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Well prepare yourself this is going to be a long question.
I’m looking at upgrading the hardware in our firm. But i have some problem in understanding how all the different components affect the preformance of 3ds max. I want to know how to get the best renderings for the least amound of money. We are currently using 3ds max design 2010 for architectural renderings.
Now our activities if important are the making of stills, movies (where only the camera moves and not the object itself, it is possible that lighting changes in the project and finally we texture bake scenes for use in other programs. The models consist of exported cad/cam models of buildings. And could range from a medium skyscraper to a part of a city on high quality with much details.
We use two types of hardware in our firm: Creative Pc and Render Slaves.
Edit: The creative should be the best money can buy, since how faster the test renders are the faster is the workflow. (although ofcourse there is a limit but I don’t know it yet), the Render Slaves should give the best rendertime/money.
From the information I could find, I conclude that a Render Slave only needs the following components.
Network adaptor
Motherboard
Processor
RAM
Hard disk
Videocard (not needed on bord vga card on the motherboard should be enough)
Now my question how do these components affect render performance?
First up the network adaptor all our projects are located on a network drive. If possible the slave should get their information from the network and also put the rendered result there. How much trafic does this generate? Is a Gbit adaptor necessary or is a 100 Mbit enough? (i know a lot of new motherboard come with Gbit adaptor but still when bought in bulk this could save some money.)
Next up hard disk space. Since most of the project is placed on a network location the hard disk should only contain the OS, 3ds max and some temp files of the rendering in progress. So i was thinking of 160 gb max maybe even 80 gb. More important seems to me the speed of the HD, is a 5400rpm disk enough or should i go faster?
3rd is RAM from what i can understand ram is used for loading in the project and storing the temporary results of the render process. And it seems to me that if the RAM has enough GB to store the info any more gb won’t improve the renderspeed. The speed of the RAM need is probally dependend how fast the data is generated. What kind of speed does everyone else need or use?
The processor has the biggest influence on rendering times as I understand it. And it seems logical that a dual core is faster then a single core. But what is faster a 2ghz single core or a 1ghz dual.
The onboard video should be enough to operate the pc since it isn’t used for renders.
And last up the motherboard should be able to handle the diferent components and the amount of ram. Also how does max handle multi-processor motherboards?
And my last question is how does the OS influences performance. So linux/unix/windows and how how does 32 vs. 64 bit figure in?
That were all my question on render slaves that i can think of. This post is getting even bigger then i thought, but I’m almost there.
Over to the the creative PC i guess the creative must have the same or better components as the renderslaves to reduce the time needed for test renders.
With probally a dedicated high-end video card to operate 3ds max.
Well this post has finally come to a end and I have probally forgotten to include some information if so please mention it and I will include it.
I hope someone has some suggestions or ideas on how to go farther from here.
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