About to upgrade my pc for Terragen 4. Tips ?

[Profane]

Hello people. Help me out here, it's a bit more technical question but i just need to know.

My current setup:

Processor: i5 2500k - 3.70ghz
Gpu: Asus gtx 660ti
Memory: 8gb 1600MHZ
Motherboard: Z68 Pro3 Gen3
120gb ssd etc.

So i'm thinking about upgrading my pc, mainly my gpu (doing my fair share of gaming). Probably going for the Nvidia 1070 pascal when they arrive.
But it got me wondering, would i notice a huge performance in terragen use if i went with a better processor / mobo + ddr4 upgrade instead?`

I tried searching the forums and saw a few threads about this issue but they were bit too technical for me.
If i went with a reasonably priced (300-400€~) i7 processor, would there be a world of difference in render times ?

Sorry if the question is complicated, not a native speaker   

[zzu]

nope my friend, you're building a gaming pc, not a workstation. For workstation, xeon cpu and nvidia quadro gpu is the key.

[Profane]

nope my friend, you're building a gaming pc, not a workstation. For workstation, xeon cpu and nvidia quadro gpu is the key.

But what if i want one machine to do both ? I understand that there is a way to make a dedicated pc for rendering only which would do it faster. But i want to have just one machine. Is it worth the upgrade then ?

[Kadri]

Have a look here please.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20937.msg208955.html#msg208955
Espescially this part:
"Graphics card will actually be even less important in TG4 than in TG3 since the new ray-traced preview is all based on the CPU, whereas the current 3D preview is OpenGL, which uses your graphics card for many functions (mainly object drawing). It may still be useful to have a reasonably good video card, but it's far from the most critical component. Any mid-level current card from Nvidia or AMD should be fine, don't spend more than $150 on it."

So buy a good CPU for rendering and if you plan to use big scenes, so much RAM you can buy (16 or more would be nice).
Then choose a graphics card you want to use for games.
Some other video editing and 3D programs can use those too. So keep that in your mind too.
A fast graphics card might help with those programs.

[Profane]

Have a look here please.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20937.msg208955.html#msg208955
Espescially this part:
"Graphics card will actually be even less important in TG4 than in TG3 since the new ray-traced preview is all based on the CPU, whereas the current 3D preview is OpenGL, which uses your graphics card for many functions (mainly object drawing). It may still be useful to have a reasonably good video card, but it's far from the most critical component. Any mid-level current card from Nvidia or AMD should be fine, don't spend more than $150 on it."

So buy a good CPU for rendering and if you plan to use big scenes, so much RAM you can buy (16 or more would be nice).
Then choose a graphics card you want to use for games.
Some other video editing and 3D programs can use those too. So keep that in your mind too.

Thank you !
I had the idea already that my current gpu would work well enough but the gaming department suffers from the current gpu so i gotta upgrade it.

Do you know much about processors ? I for one don't know much and i would love to know if the i5 2500k to Intel Skylake i7-6700K would be worthy upgrade just for terragen ?

[Kadri]

I don't follow hardware changes so much as before. You will get maybe more insightful answers here from others.

But from these benchmarks it looks like that you can get a little less then twice the rendering speed from the new CPU.
If this is worth or not it is up to you of course (especially if you have to change your mainboard and RAM's too or not).
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/571/Intel_Core_i5_i5-2500K_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-6700K.html#bench

[Profane]

I don't follow hardware changes so much as before. You will get maybe more insightful answers here from others.

But from this benchmarks it looks like that you can get a little less then twice the rendering speed from the new CPU.
If this is worth or not it is up to you of course (especially if you have to change your mainboard and RAM's too or not).
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/571/Intel_Core_i5_i5-2500K_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-6700K.html#bench

So it seems that i would be getting twice the rendering power if i upgrade my mobo + memory too. But then again, i don't know if it's so important since my rendering always happens when i'm asleep. Of course the projects that usually would render in 12 hours would render in 6 hours but that is a lot of money for such luxury. Go and figure..

Thanks a lot for the help here I was clueless before, but now i feel like i have an idea of what i should do.

[Oshyan]

Quadro graphics boards are increasingly useless IMO, only really important still for CAD work. Certainly they are not necessarily - or even helpful - for Terragen. Perhaps in the future the Realtime Preview will be GPU-accelerated, and then you'll want a good graphics card, but a 1070 or 1080 would be far more cost-effective and high performance than most any Quadro or other professional card.

As far as sensible upgrades go, you already have a quad core at a decent speed. An i7 at equivalent clock speed would be slightly faster due to hyperthreading. The 6700k has hyperthreading as well as a slightly higher per-core CPU speed, so you'd definitely get better render times. But by how much? Consult our benchmark results and see if you can find your CPU and the 6700k and there's your answer. This is the best way to make an informed upgrade decision. Just know that Terragen's rendering has been and likely for a while will be entirely on the CPU, only the preview modes ever use your graphics card.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eX9Ltn3_9BjsamA0Pxeflv5AKrjkgViEY8VuetB8e3k/edit

- Oshyan

[Profane]

Quadro graphics boards are increasingly useless IMO, only really important still for CAD work. Certainly they are not necessarily - or even helpful - for Terragen. Perhaps in the future the Realtime Preview will be GPU-accelerated, and then you'll want a good graphics card, but a 1070 or 1080 would be far more cost-effective and high performance than most any Quadro or other professional card.

As far as sensible upgrades go, you already have a quad core at a decent speed. An i7 at equivalent clock speed would be slightly faster due to hyperthreading. The 6700k has hyperthreading as well as a slightly higher per-core CPU speed, so you'd definitely get better render times. But by how much? Consult our benchmark results and see if you can find your CPU and the 6700k and there's your answer. This is the best way to make an informed upgrade decision. Just know that Terragen's rendering has been and likely for a while will be entirely on the CPU, only the preview modes ever use your graphics card.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eX9Ltn3_9BjsamA0Pxeflv5AKrjkgViEY8VuetB8e3k/edit

- Oshyan

That is one handy sheet.
For what i was able to gather:
Similar setup like mine renders the scene in 11-12 min while i7 6700k does it in 5min.
The difference is big, but not sure if worth the money.

I wonder if it would be worth for me to get more ram ? How much does terragen is dependant on ram ?
I currently only have 8 gb, and ddr 3 doesn't cost much at all so i could easily get up to 16 without spending a fortune.
But would that be worth it ?

[ajcgi]

I would certainly go for that 16 at the very least. The workstation I'm on now has 24. With a couple of instances of the erosion plugin running in a scene it can push up towards that limit quite easily without optimisation. There are machines here with 64, but they're for pretty hardcore modelling, simulation etc to the best of my knowledge.

[Oshyan]

More RAM will not generally speed up renders, but it will make it possible to have more complex scenes. Terragen 4 will also use a bit more memory for rendering, and potentially a good deal more for the Realtime Preview. Since RAM is cheap it's a good, effective, useful upgrade to do regardless.

- Oshyan

[AP]

Hopefully my 4 gigabytes of RAM is sufficient enough under the circumstances because that is all I have.

[Profane]

More RAM will not generally speed up renders, but it will make it possible to have more complex scenes. Terragen 4 will also use a bit more memory for rendering, and potentially a good deal more for the Realtime Preview. Since RAM is cheap it's a good, effective, useful upgrade to do regardless.

- Oshyan

So on topic of terragen 4, this might be a tricky question to answer but how does TG4 compare to tg3 in terms of raw power needed from computer ? Is terragen 4 lighter or heavier to run ? Often times softwares become heavier to run with updates, but are there any news about this ?

[Tangled-Universe]

TG4 is basically quite equal to TG3 in how 'heavy' it is to run.

Where does it differ then?

The new preview mode is CPU based. The faster the CPU the faster you can iterate over changes in your scene.
It works just fine on my stock i7-2600K and the same rules apply to the preview mode in TG3 and earlier: don't be crazy with atmosphere/cloud sample settings and things like soft shadows etc.
There's basically no change in that behaviour nor can it be improved in that respect, because if you want to preview how it looks with high atmo/cloud settings and soft shadows, then the preview mode tries to show you a preview of that. Simple.
The new preview mode works fine on my stock i7-2600K. It gives much faster and more accurate previews of what the lighting does to my scene, compared to the TG3 preview renderer. Checking cloud seeds also is lots faster.
Basically it means that a thick CPU will benefit the already improved experience. It will do the same things, only faster.

It's no surprise the improved cloud shader is more demanding than the current v2 shader. It does crazy good scattering, very close to the real thing.
How much more demanding is difficult to say as it depends on a lot of factors, a lot driven by user experience as well. Same goes for v2 clouds as well.
I can't go into details yet, but once the time is there us testers will share our experience and tips/tricks to get the smoothest workflow we have come up with so far.

In a nutshell:
TG4 itself in its bare state as a running program is barely more demanding than TG3.
The new preview and cloud shader are more CPU-intensive and a little bit more RAM-hungry.

Buying a new TG PC? -> get the most total GHz and RAM you can afford.
Having 32GB RAM and still some budget left? -> more total GHz.

Personally if you buy a machine now and you intend to do serious TG work and you would like to have it future proof, then go for 32GB RAM.
I chose 16GB 4 years ago and I'm hitting the limit more frequently since last year. It was a good choice.
That's 4GB/core. Now I'd go for 6-8GB/core.

[Oshyan]

4GB of RAM (total) is really not enough for creating anything but basic scenes, unfortunately. This is a bit more true in TG4 than TG3, but even in TG3 4GB is a pretty small amount. RAM is so cheap (relatively speaking), hopefully you can upgrade.

- Oshyan