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 :-X
nope my friend, you're building a gaming pc, not a workstation. For workstation, xeon cpu and nvidia quadro gpu is the key.
Quote from: zzu on June 05, 2016, 04:24:51 AM
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 ?
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.
Quote from: Kadri on June 05, 2016, 05:28:22 AM
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 ?
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
Quote from: Kadri on June 05, 2016, 06:07:28 AM
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.
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
Quote from: Oshyan on June 05, 2016, 05:26:57 PM
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 ?
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.
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
Hopefully my 4 gigabytes of RAM is sufficient enough under the circumstances because that is all I have.
Quote from: Oshyan on June 06, 2016, 04:13:31 PM
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 ?
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.
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
Perhaps someday I can upgrade. For the time being all I have is my Ultrabook.
I just finished building a new workstation computer for 3D modeling and rendering, Terragen, photo and video processing and it is working well but I went a little crazy in some areas. My new system build is:
ASSRock x99 Extreme 4 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHZ 6 Core processor (OC'd to 4.3GHZ)
128GB of RipJaws 2400 DDR4 Memory (Probably a bit of overkill but I couldn't resist)
512GB Samsung NVME 950 Pro M.2 SSD (OS and Application Drive)
500GB (x2) Samsung 850 EVO SSD drives
NVIDIA Quadro M4000 Workstation Card (8GB DDR5)
LG Internal Blu-Ray Burner Optical drive
EVGA Supernova 750 Gold PSU
Corsair H100i v2 Hydro Series CPU cooler
6 Cougar 120mm 1200 RPM Silent Case Fans (Intakes)
1 Cougar 120mm 1200 RPM Silent Case Fan (Exhaust)
NZXT Sentry Mix 2 6 Fan Controller
Corsair Vengeance C70 Case to hold everything.
I went this route because the motherboard will support both i7 and Xeon processors and I eventually want to upgrade to a higher grade Xeon processor, though I spent to much on everything else to get the Xeon this year. :-\
So far I am happy with the results but still trying to tinker with quality, cache and bucket size to decrease my render times and maintain maximum CPU usage through the duration of the render. I have the system performing pretty well with all 6 cores (12 threads) running at 100% my system temperature is sitting stable at 68 (c) to 72 (c) for the duration of the renders.
I can verify Oshyan's statement about NVIDIA Quadro cards or workstation cards in general not really being an advantage for use with Terragen, though it does help with Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and some other 3D modeling applications. GeForce cards should suffice nicely. Oshyan is also spot on about a ton of ram not speeding up renders, but I like having the headroom to handle more complicated scenes if I so desire to over complicate things, which I often do, the net result of watching This is Spinal Tap in my younger formative days.
Upgrading the CPU and RAM is definitely a good way to go.
Don't be surprised if your upgrades do not cut your render times in half though. With my graphics laptop running an i7 4700M 3.4GHz processor and 24GB DDR 3 RAM I posted 14:52 for the Terragen Benchmark, with my new system I believe I only saw a 17% to 20% performance increase on the benchmark. I will run it again and verify. Don't get me wrong that 17% to 20% increase is still a lot if you have large and long scenes to render, it just most likely won't take your 33 hour render down to 16 hours.
I originally wanted to get a dual Xeon system from a well know workstation company but the cost proved to be prohibitive this year, it was going to run almost $8,000 US, I built this system for less than half.
Now just biding my time to get my hands on Terragen 4 to see how the system handles it. I have the pre-order in and waiting as the days so slowly creep by until it is released. :)
Quote from: 3DnTechNut on June 08, 2016, 04:01:04 AM
...
Don't be surprised if your upgrades do not cut your render times in half though. With my graphics laptop running an i7 4700M 3.4GHz processor and 24GB DDR 3 RAM I posted 14:52 for the Terragen Benchmark, with my new system I believe I only saw a 17% to 20% performance increase on the benchmark. I will run it again and verify. Don't get me wrong that 17% to 20% increase is still a lot if you have large and long scenes to render, it just most likely won't take your 33 hour render down to 16 hours.
...
Nice computer :)
There might other reasons i don't know. Curious.
But i would try to see if 2 or more open seasons of Terragen could bring render times to twice as fast.
It would help for animation but even with one image you could use crop rendering for example.
It helped me with 32 RAM. Especially with that much RAM you have i would try that.
Thanks to all of you for your helpful replies. I made my call and i will keep rocking my i5, going to OC it a bit and upgrading my ram to 16gb.
Gaming is still too essential part of my day to day life so getting the new gpu seems to be the best upgrade for me since the tg4 won't be notably heavier to run.
Now begins the long wait for the TG4 release :) !
That sounds like a really sensible upgrade choice indeed. 16GB of RAM will be good for TG4. :)
- Oshyan
Quote from: Kadri on June 08, 2016, 06:04:31 AM
Quote from: 3DnTechNut on June 08, 2016, 04:01:04 AM
...
Don't be surprised if your upgrades do not cut your render times in half though. With my graphics laptop running an i7 4700M 3.4GHz processor and 24GB DDR 3 RAM I posted 14:52 for the Terragen Benchmark, with my new system I believe I only saw a 17% to 20% performance increase on the benchmark. I will run it again and verify. Don't get me wrong that 17% to 20% increase is still a lot if you have large and long scenes to render, it just most likely won't take your 33 hour render down to 16 hours.
...
Nice computer :)
There might other reasons i don't know. Curious.
But i would try to see if 2 or more open seasons of Terragen could bring render times to twice as fast.
It would help for animation but even with one image you could use crop rendering for example.
It helped me with 32 RAM. Especially with that much RAM you have i would try that.
My render times above were from the first day I built the system. I forgot that the day I did the benchmark I had not overclocked the CPU yet and I only had 32GB of Corsair Ballistix Ram in the PC because the motherboard would not post using 8 RAM modules from two 4 module kits, that is why I decided to upgrade to an 8x16Gb module kit.
I did the benchmark again today with the CPU overclocked to 4.4GHz and the DRAM reference clock set to 133mhz with all 12 threads and 100% CPU utilization and the time was 10:50 which is actually a 28% increase from the earlier render time.
I ran two instances of Terragen as you suggested; I did a left and right half crop render of the scene, and put a max of 6 threads on each render. The two renders finished in 06:00. This was a 45% decrease in render time and yet in both instances all 6 cores and twelve threads were active at 100% CPU utilization. Confusing.
Even more confusing is that rendering the benchmark with 6 physical cores and no logical cores rendered the entire scene in 08:09 roughly another 25% increase from the benchmark render. The single 6 core render running at 54% CPU utilization took 2 minutes longer to render the entire scene than running 2 instances of the program with each rendering half the scene and 100% CPU utilization.
I tried changing the cache size and rendering with the 6 physical cores versus the 6 cores and 6 hyperthreads and everytime using just the physical cores rendering was about 23% faster, so how can using both the physical and logical cores together in 2 instances be 25% faster then 1 rendering.
I read in the forums before about Terragen not handling hyperthreads as well as physical cores but it seems like it would be true anytime hyperthreads were used.
I thought this virtual cores vs physical cores thing had been sussed? I've just been tearing along with hyperthreading on with nary a care in the world.
Just for fun I opened 3 instances of Terragen and did a three way crop, Left Center, Right and it finished in 05:35 about another 10% - 11% increase, interesting! However running three instances did raise system temp by 2 to 3C. It definitely renders faster on multicore systems if I do split crop renders, but, I don't think I would want to stitch everything together constantly so probably just something to keep in the vault for really big render jobs of still frames.
So this was true in T2 and T3, curious if it is still as significant in T4? Eagerly waiting to find out.
If you look at the benchmark results list you can see that your results are actually atypical. All of the other 5820k CPUs are *notably* faster than yours. This surprised us too, so we emailed you about it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eX9Ltn3_9BjsamA0Pxeflv5AKrjkgViEY8VuetB8e3k/edit?usp=sharing
TG3 (and 4) are not ideal at multithreading, but we have made steady progress on the issue since TG2 and things are very good now for average machines (<32 threads). And both can make reasonable use of hyperthreads (logical rather than physical cores), although at very high core/thread counts (>32), it is best to only use physical cores as the overhead for use of hyperthreads becomes more than the modest performance gain that hyperthreading usually brings (~20%).
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on June 09, 2016, 06:20:41 PM
If you look at the benchmark results list you can see that your results are actually atypical. All of the other 5820k CPUs are *notably* faster than yours. This surprised us too, so we emailed you about it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eX9Ltn3_9BjsamA0Pxeflv5AKrjkgViEY8VuetB8e3k/edit?usp=sharing
TG3 (and 4) are not ideal at multithreading, but we have made steady progress on the issue since TG2 and things are very good now for average machines (<32 threads). And both can make reasonable use of hyperthreads (logical rather than physical cores), although at very high core/thread counts (>32), it is best to only use physical cores as the overhead for use of hyperthreads becomes more than the modest performance gain that hyperthreading usually brings (~20%).
- Oshyan
I was wondering about that myself, but if I just load the benchmark file and render without lowering the max cores to 6 that is the result I get every time.
Yes, it's very strange. Something is definitely not right. We'll look into it with you through the support mailbox and hopefully get to the bottom of it.
- Oshyan