Building new Computer

[Rocknugraphics]

  I have been using terragen since the first release. I have purchased Terragen 3 and was looking for some advice on building a new Computer to run it. Only have about 800.00 to do so.
As far as cpu, ram and graphics cards. What should I be looking for?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[jaf]

If you're building from scratch, make sure it can handle the heat when rendering.  The temperature of the 8 cpu's on my PC can go up 50% in less than 10 seconds if I go all out on a render (like from 75F to 105F,  so good airflow and cooling is very important.  Make sure you have enough power for your hardware.  Heat problems are usually tough to trouble shoot.

I went with a cheap cpu, motherboard, and graphics card but put the money into the case and power supply.  Eventually, I upgraded the graphics card and cpu, though nowhere near the I7 cost.  But it's relatively fast and runs cool -- I've been happy with it.

[PabloMack]

Terragen doesn't need a graphics card so you can get a motherboard with onboard graphics and that will save you some money. Terragen can be memory hungry so I would get a low cost motherboard that can expand to 32GB or more in the future. Start with 16GB of DDR3 and double that later when you need it. I would recommend a processor that can be air cooled. Heat dissipation goes up exponentially if you overclock and it doesn't gain you very much processing power. If you like Intel then I would recommend an i7. Terragen tends to be compute-bound so it is worth putting some of the money into a good processor. If you want to go AMD then I recommend the FX-8350 which doesn't waste chip space on integrated graphics but gives you additional cores instead, for a total of eight. The advantage of Intel vs. AMD is a big question. Terragen often uses only one core to prepare for rendering so an Intel will get you through that faster because it has better single-core performance. On the other hand, rendering usually takes most of the time and an AMD 8-core will get you through that part faster for processors within its price range. An FX-8350 is generally cheaper than an i7 so that needs to be considered. It is well worth getting 1 or 2 TB hard drive to hold your renders. Of course you should stick with 1920 X 1080 for a monitor. I also think it is well worth getting a wireless optical mouse. They have gotten to be very affordable and it will save you from the metal fatigue that usually ends a wired mouse's useful life. To get all of these features under $800 you will probably have to build it yourself.

[Oshyan]

Terragen does not use the graphics card for primary rendering, but faster cards *do* help with speed in the 3D preview, which is getting increasingly complex. The newer textured mode for example. So that's worth considering. Getting a high-end card is certainly unnecessary, but something better than onboard is probably ideal (especially as onboard solutions tend to have more driver issues, sadly).

Most of TG's rendering process is now multithreaded, including populations (as of TG3.0), GI, and of course primary rendering. So more cores is generally better. Intel CPUs tend to perform better for Terragen, especially when considered "clock for clock". But the price/performance ratio is a more open question, i.e. for a given price which system will give you better performance. That being said Intel also tends to run cooler and be more overclockable, if that's something you ever want to consider. For rendering running cool is of course important.

I agree on 16GB of memory as a minimum. Get it in 2 8GB memory sticks for easier later upgradeability.

- Oshyan

[PabloMack]

I have a large scene with ~30M plants in it. With even the latest TG3 release, when it is "preparing for render" CPU utilization is only about 13% which tells me that only one of eight cores is working on it. Once it starts the main render, CPU utilization goes up to 100%. The scene uses GI caching and population caching. I can't tell you what it is doing when it is "preparing for render" but it stays in that phase for a few minutes at least before rendering starts. I wish the whole process was multi-threaded but apparently it is not. Each frame takes about 45 min on an FX-8350 (over an hour with a Phenom II x4 955). Of course I have seen a dramatic increase in pre-render speed with the latest release.

[Oshyan]

I'm not sure what the "preparing" phase fully consists of either, but I'm not sure it *can* be fully multithreaded. I would guess some of it - if not a majority - is reading necessary files from disk (e.g. GI and population caches) and possibly doing other things that wouldn't be helped by multithreading. Hopefully it can be improved somewhat, at least.

- Oshyan

[archonforest]

I would get an Intel CPU with hypher-tread function as that doubles the cores and TG certainly takes advantage of this. I just got a dual quad Intel Xeon set-up and it gives me 16 processing cores...sweet stuff

[PabloMack]

I would get an Intel CPU with hypher-tread function as that doubles the cores and TG certainly takes advantage of this. I just got a dual quad Intel Xeon set-up and it gives me 16 processing cores...sweet stuff

Hyper-threading doesn't double the cores. It doubles the hardware threads. From what I've read, it typically adds 11~30% to multi-threaded performance and nothing to single-threaded performance. May I ask how much you paid for your motherboard and dual Xeons?

[PabloMack]

I'm not sure what the "preparing" phase fully consists of either...

I have compared the render times for a Phenom II x4 955 and an FX-8350. The former is a 3.4 MHz quad-core and the latter is a 4.0 MHz pile-driver "octa-core". Even though it has eight true integer cores, they share four floating point ALUs. The FX-8350 is supposed to have 73% more multi-threaded performance than the Phenom but, in my measurements, it is seeing less than that. Persumably, it is partly because the render is spending so much time in the "preparing" phase. But then the FX-8350 has to go through a 100BaseT E/N hub to access the files while all of the storage for the Phenom is local. Perhaps the FX-8350 will speed up a little after I replace the 100BaseT hub with a Gigabit version. I can see how a lot of preparation may be inherently serial (such as parsing files), in which case, there isn't much you can do to parallelize the code.

[mr-miley]

May I suggest this

Can't see why you'd need anything more. And as it uses your TV as a monitor, you don't need to buy one of those too.
Miles

[mr-miley]

Sorry to lower the tone of a serious conversation, couldn't resist it 

[archonforest]

LOL Mr. Miley! I remember old times

For Pablo: Hypher tread simulate logical cores. I have 8 real and 8 logical ones. TG computes therefore on 16 threads/ lines. Otherwise I also did a test between a dual Xeon 3.3Ghz and a dual i3 2.6Ghz cpu. The i3 was hypher treaded thus 4 processing cores were used by TG. The i3 finished the renders about 50 percent faster. I was shocked as I was pretty proud of my old dual Xeon baby....but double thread is double thread.

And the price....well this monster under my desk is a refurbished workstation therefore I cannot gave you the real price of the mobo and the cpu but I can give u the link to the shop. They have great prices and u can build up your machine as u want

[PabloMack]

May I suggest this

Heee...heee. Do you remember the Sinclair? Its PCB had a total of four IC's; a Z80, a ROM, a RAM and a PAL for glue logic. The video signal was generated by a CPU polling routine. You only had a picture when the Z80 was idling for keyboard input. When it was busy, the picture went away. Now that's efficiency!

http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pictures/sinclair_zx80_SDIM0759.jpg

[Rocknugraphics]

Thanks for all the insight guys. Going to be ordering the kit tomorrow.  Cant wait to fire it up and do some renders. Thanks again

[PabloMack]

...especially as onboard solutions tend to have more driver issues, sadly.

Does this include the i7 onchip graphics? I would think that moving most of the graphics onto the processor would eliminate a lot of the onboard graphics problems as the drivers should be applicable across the APU line. Perhaps people should take a new look at them since they are becoming very common.