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Hardware upgrading questions

MlewiMlewi Posts: 3
edited March 2017 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hiya,

I have some pretty old hardware and Im about to upgrade my CPU and my MOBO. For my board i'm upgrading to a Z170-p (for a possibilty of a double GPU in the future) and the question is for the cpu. I use IRAY for rendering so would upgrading to an I3 6100 and saving up for a better graphics card be better than upgrading to a I5 6500. And how much is Iray processor dependant or in other words and in more general terms how much will getting a low end processor affect IRay renders times and will it bottleneck a high end graphics card ?.

My current setup :

CPU: I3 3220, MOBO : an old biostar h61mgv3, 16GB RAM, GPU: GTX 750TI.

Post edited by Mlewi on

Comments

  • SixDsSixDs Posts: 2,384

    Your current GTX 750 Ti has 640 CUDA cores and 2 GB of VRAM memory. Not a lot of either for using Iray. The recommended minimum is 4 GB of VRAM and the more cuda cores the better. That doesn't mean you cannot use Iray, or that you cannot use GPU rendering. It simply means that you will be limited to very simple scenes, as the entire scene and associated resources must fit within that 2 GB frame buffer of the video card to use the GPU. (Note: you also may not have the entire 2 GB available - for example, if you are using the graphics card for your display as well, that also will consume some of that memory). So what happens if you try to render a scene in Iray and it does not fit in the graphics cards memory? It defaults to CPU mode. That will be slower in terms of render time than GPU rendering. Moreover, the amount of difference will depend on the speed of your CPU and the number of cores that it has. An i3 6100, although running at a fast 3.7 Ghz, and uses hyperthreading technology, it only has 2 physical cores. Hyperthreading makes this 4 virtual cores, but that is not the same as a quad core. In that respect, the i5 6500 with 4 actual CPU cores is faster. But even one of the i7 quads with hyperthreading (8 virtual cores) will still be slower than GPU rendering. Will a slower CPU bottleneck a true high end Nvidia graphics card for Iray rendering? No. But that high end card must have sufficient graphics memory to hold all of the scene info for your typical renders, or its back to the CPU and long render times. So, does buying the cheaper processor now and spending any savings later on a better graphics card make sense? Yes, but only if you are willing to put up with some very slow render times until you can afford that new card.

  • MlewiMlewi Posts: 3

    Thank you very much and I really appreciate your clarification,

    I might go with the I5 6500 untill I can buy a better graphics card since I manage to work things out using my current CPU when running out of VRAM so things will be better with the I5.

  • SixDsSixDs Posts: 2,384

    No problem. Just remember to have fun no matter what! smiley

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