Experiences with multi-core processors 10 to 20 core range
3141592654
Posts: 975
I should be receiving an inheritance in the near future. I am thinking of using it towards either a high end laptop or a good to high-end desktop. One advantage of a desktop is the possibility of a multi-core system (like 10 to twenty cores) which might be really ncie for rendering. Do any of you have experience with such a computer? What has been your experience (good or bad)? Thank you, Pi Man
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Dual Xeon rig here.. and my own personal opinion (as you'll hear a lot of conflicting info here) yea, if you can afford and want the best, go for it.
Obviously as you get higher up the specs you'll see less bang for your buck, but if you want out and out performance, then you can't really go wrong. If you do Iray rendering, you want to focus on decent GPU's, but for all round creation content, more cores are better. You do get a sweet spot for core count vs clock speed, but again, it kinda depends on what you want to do with it.
I'd rather invest in a better Nvidia graphics card. Switching from an old 3 core CPU to a Ryzen 1800x only did so much, barley anything really. But Switching from an old graphics card to a 1080ti made a huge diffrence.
doublepost.
Graphics cards are awesome when the scene fits in GPU RAM; I use a Threadripper 16core; considering upgrading to 32.
It is about a third of the speed of a 980ti; but it has no RAM issues - obviously.
I have a dual Xeon system as well, with a total of eight cores, which these days isn't considered a lot. With 12 or 16 I could do more. With Xeons it also matters how fast they are, and mine are older and a bit slower.
There are a few things that even more cores won't help. Unless they've changed it, Iray/Daz still only uses a single thread for the scene database creation phase, which occurs just prior to rendering. Your extra cores won't help here.
For Iray rendering nothing beats a good CUDA card. The 1070ti has a decent price these days (about $450), and sports some 2500 cores.
I have a dual 8 core Xeon machine (32 threads). It has 64 gigs of ram and a 980ti with 6 gigs of ram. It's my opinion that it ALL matters: the amount of system ram (good for keeping those huge scenes spinning freely in the viewport when you want to move around), the amound of CPU cores (for when the GFX card just isn't enough - happens more than you think - and you need the processor to take over render crunching duties) and graphics card for when everything works out and you can do it all on the GPU. Also, dforce uses GPU as well, so the best card you can get can benefit you there as well. My advice always is, get the best computer (all around) that you can afford IF you'll actually use it. Since you're a rendering person like the rest of us, you'll be more satisfied in the end. Of course, if you were just a net surfer I would never advise any of that...lol.
Laurie
And as always, you need to keep two things in mind:
1) If it's state-of-the-art when you purchase it, it will be less than that by the time you get everything installed and customized to your satisfaction
2) Once you've picked your system you can get 25 to 40 percent savings on it by waiting six months before you buy (corollary to #1 above).
ETA - I built a top-end system in January of 2015; by late August 2015 the component prices had dropped $1200 overall (but I had 8 months of usage on it by then - acceptable trade-off for me).
Thank you everyone, especially AllenArt and JackTomlin, for the comments so far. They have been helpful. I have been exceeding my graphics card capabilities more and more in recent months as well as increasingly getting into animation (as well as starting to make some of my own models). It sounds like a multi-core system might be a good fit for me.
Other people, please feel free to keep sharing your experience / advice !
This is the most complex piece I have done so far, just to give you some idea of what is happening.
Holy cow that's a lot of figures! That would bring any computer to it's knees ;)
Laurie
What's your current specs? If you're maxing out a 1080Ti, or similar, then CPU is going to be your best bet.. if you're using something with less VRAM, then definately consider something along those lines (in addition to a beefy CPU if the budget allows)
...+1
Particularly if you work in Carrara which does not have native GPU rendering. Kind of drooling over that forthcoming 32 core Threadripper. However, if I could afford dual 24 core Xeons that would be 96 threads for rendering (4 shy of the maximum thread/core count Carrara supports).
Oh and another nice part of high core counts is you can assign groups of cores for multi tasking. If they ever came out with a 64 core/128 thread Threadripper that supports 128 GB of memory, it would be great as I would be able to assign the maximum 100 threads to Carrara rendering while having an additional 28 threads for working in other programmes at the same time with little to no lag.
...where that backfired was with GPU cards last year when cryptomining and a shortage of memory chips sent card prices into the stratosphere. I used to do multimedia development and you had to figure out how to stay several steps ahead of the tech curve to not get burned as technology changes so fast.
The old saying went "drive a new car off the lot and it depreciates by ⅓ it's value ".
With tech, what you see on the shelf in the store is already old hat.
Personally, I despise using CPU for rendering, since it pretty much brings my entire PC to its knees and is incredibly slow. I have a Ryzen 7 1700 with 8 cores, and it is so much slower than my GTX-1080ti plus GTX-1070 that it is relatively useless for rendering.
Another option instead of worrying about overloading your GPU VRAM is to try this:
Render your scene in pieces like the pros do, and merge them together at the end using some free post production tools. That gives you ultimate control over each element in your scene, and more importantly allows you to tweak small parts of the scene without re-rendering the entire thing. And you can do amazing effects far faster and with real time control (like blurs, depth of field, changing colors, changing lighting, etc.)
Also, consider what I call "scene management". Rarely do you want everything in your scene clearly visible and in focus and well lit. Often you want to direct the viewers' eyes to certain parts of the scene, and the rest can be out of focus or in the dark. Take advantage of that and manage your scene components so that they're not all high resolution with huge texture images.
Yeah, it all takes a bit more work, but I'd much rather spend another 2 hours planning my scene and doing some post production than re-rendering the same thing 5 times at 1 hour each time with the CPU to get everything just right. And any tweaks you decide on means another 1 hour render.
...this is why I currently have two systems. One I can work on while the other is rendering (and why like I mentioned above high core count CPUs are wonderful).
More involves post production (other than applying a filter, adjusting tonemapping or text to an image) and I don't work all that well together. I usually have too many items on different planes (often casting shadows on ones behind or catching reflections form surrounding items), for layered rendering (without having to manually "paint" shadows/reflections in) and not into the "jigsaw puzzle" concept of piecing spot renders together to make a full image.
If everything fits nice on my Titan-X that's great, if it doesn't I better have a good backup to handle the load. That's where an HCC CPU and as much memory as I can afford comes into play (the last thing I want is the process exceeding system memory and dumping to even much slower swap mode). 12 GB is most likely going to be the VRAM limit for Nvidia Consumer cards so as not to undercut their far more expensive pro grade series so I see little improvement there except in hardware performance.
One idea that could help with is Daz introducing native Iray batch rendering. That way you could shut the programme and scene down once it's submitted to the render engine (like Reality/Lux and Poser Pro do) to devote your system's total resources to the render job.
I just went through this I have an i9 with 10 cores and a gtx1080 Ti and 32gig mem I put it up against my old i7 with 4 cores and a 2x980 Ti 32gig and the old system was quicker. So the bottom line is Iray doesn't use the CPU power only the GPU, then I got a 2nd 1080 Ti and that doubled the speed straight away so I know where you should put the money and it's not in the CPU cores.
...for myself that would pretty much require building an entirely new system to host dual GPUs which includes:
A heftier PSU to safely support 2 250w cards running at peak output.
Most likely a new MB as I don't think mine has dual x 16 slots (old X58 P6T which only supports PCIe 2.0 has an LGA 1366 socket [early generation i7/Xeon]).
Which would mean having to get a newer CPU and memory as the CPU socket would be newer and most likely the DIMMs 288 pin DDR4 (currently running DDR3)
Yep, save for the drives, a new system.
I would probably also need to add liquid cooling as running two high performance cards (Titan-Xs) even with all the fans I have in the the case, it will be a hefty task keeping things cool inside with two of those monsters running side by side.
Unfortunately am on a fixed income, so unless I some sort of windfall comes my way, I have to get the most out of what I already have which is fine. So I won't get "5 min Iray renders". Not a big deal as that Titan.will still shave hours off the process provided the scenes don't become "too epic".
If Octane4 pans out to all the expectations, then that just makes things better as 20$ a month is a small price to have access to such powerful engine with which I can do out of core rendering for those really epic level scenes.
Oh, and between the two systems, I have the same core/thread count (10/20) and combined 56 GB of system memory for Carrara networked rendering (as mentioned Carrara does not natively support GPU rendering).
Thank you for the advice everyone ... the help is really appreciated ! !
I was still limited by the funds available, but the system I have come out with includes a 14 core i9 processor (for 3delight), 65 Gb ram (for large scenes), and a Quadro M6000 with 24 Gb vram and 3073 cuda cores (for iray). I think this combination will work well for my use with large scenes and animation.
That is a excellent scene. . A render like that would take my system out. I'd have to do something like that in layers Very nice scene lots to look at . :)
Thank you. Actually, I did do it in layers - eight of them. My current system is an i5 and a geforce 960m. I had the room, the props, each row of students, the teachers desk, and a separate layer just to get all the shadows on the floor. My system could just barely handle 6 characters in a render which made a row. One test of my new system will be to try and load the entire scene and render it and see what the difference is between the layered version and a full version - it should not be much, but I am guessing I will notice a difference in the deepest shadows and highlights.
The scary thing is, if my system can handle it, I would not mind making a short animation with this scene.
bruh. i have dreamt about rendering a scene with that many figures to completion....i cant fathom...my brain computer is about to crash...