Hi,
i am interior designer and use 3d max for for creative visualization and high quality renderings. i am gonna buy a new system. kindly help me to choose specicifations. i need professional quality setup with average budget. i want to have a system with minimum rendering time. also plz let me know what exactly matters in minimzing the rendering time- is it graphic card or multicore system or RAM ... also many a times i need to open multiple programes(like photoshop,autocad) at same time, so need my system accordingly.
i got a quotation from a company and they included 16 gb ram and 2gb of graphic card. kindly tell me if this is ‘more than enough’ as they qouted a very high total.
thanx.

Hi there,

I does depend a lot on which renderer you are going to use.  IRay and Quicksilver utilize the graphics card for rendering.  The viewports also uses the graphics card to display the scene.  So a good graphics card will improve the speed of these systems. A fast multi-core CPU will also increase performance here.

On the other hand, Mental Ray and the scanline renderer don’t use the graphics card.  They rely solely on the CPU to render the scene.  A fast multi-core CPU will increase performance here.  The graphics card performance will have little impact on these renderers.  I think this is also the case with VRay.

Renderers aside, RAM is used to hold the scene in memory when it is being used.  So the larger data size of the scene, the more RAM it will use.  Many large textures and lots of polygons will increase the size of your scene.  Some effects also chew up RAM, like shader displacement and Hair and Fur.  These get calculated at render time and this has to be stored in RAM for the render.

RAM is also used by some renderers to calculate the scene before rendering.

I’m not sure how much RAM speed affects 3dsmax performance.  Maybe someone else can chip in on that.

Bear in mind you can easily upgrade RAM and the graphics card at a later date.  The CPU is also upgradable, but that’s not as easy.

So if you will be using Mental Ray in order of priority I would say:
1. A fast CPU
2. A good motherboard, case and PSU with the capacity to easily handle upgrades.
3. Lots of RAM
4. A good graphics card with multiple outputs for multiple monitors.

Also get two monitors if you can afford it.  It’s so useful.  You could also go for a couple of dirt cheap monitors initially.  They might not last forever but again, these can be upgraded really easily when funds allow.

I hope this overview is helpful anyway.  I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’ve made any mistakes.  And maybe someone could be more specific about types of Video Card, RAM, CPU etc.

Alex

3dsmax 2012 14.0 SP2 / Mudbox 2012 / Windows 7 Pro 64-bit / i7-2600k 3.40GHz o|c to 4.5GHz / 16GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB / 2x 1920 x 1200 / 1TB WD HD / Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000 / Emprex 6310U Keyboard / Wacom Bamboo Pen / Nescafé Alta Rica black, no sugar.

Hey

Rendering is CPU intensive so the more cores the merrier. =)

If I was you I would focus more on the following. Not the cheapest solution, but fastest.

- Two quad core Xeon CPUs, or higher.
- A motherboard that supports two CPUs
- A Solid state Hard disk
- Win 7 64Bit

That should suffice:
- 16Gb Ram
- 1-2Gb Graphics Card
- 21” Screen

Also consider using your existing PC as a render slave. I have a similar set-up at home, an 8-core machine with a 4-core and a 2-core slaves. That gives me 14 cores to render. To put it in context I can produce an A3 image (300dpi)within 20min with all the bells and whistles.

\W