PC for 3d rendering...

[muddi900]

My friend is doing a course on 3d modeling and animation during the summer and needs a new PC. He will probably be working in 3D Max studio. He has requested my services. I have only 2 question:


What is more important for rendering? the GPU or CPU? GPU seems obvious, but I just want to be sure. Also, does he need a high end GPU, or can he get by with a 4770?
Which of these is the best MoBo in price/performance ratio? (http://galaxy.com.pk/forms/motherboard.htm)

[Grifter]

CPU and memory are more important unless he is going to buy an OpenGL based card designed for rendering like an nVidia Quadro card or a 3D Labs Oxygen card.

I would say the best performance VS price would be the ASUS P5Q-E paired with either the Q6600 or preferably a Q9550 with 4GB of RAM minimum.

[Spectre-7]

CPU and memory are more important unless he is going to buy an OpenGL based card designed for rendering like an nVidia Quadro card or a 3D Labs Oxygen card.

Even then, there are damn few renderers that can be GPU accelerated... Basically just Nvidia's Gelato (http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_home.html) at the moment, which isn't even a popular choice. Otherwise, virtually all final rendering is done in CPU; I'm pretty sure that includes both of Max's packaged renderers, Mental Ray and its default scanline renderer.

Most parts of the rendering pipeline are highly parallelizable, so rendering speed tends to scale linearly with number of cores available. Four cores and four gigs of RAM? Dandy! Eight cores and sixteen gigs of RAM? Dandier!

Personally though, I don't really find that rendering speed is the biggest issue in the world, and an artist can go a long way toward tempering his need for more processing power by setting up scenes intelligently. It's not uncommon for newbies to send me simple files they're working on that initially take ~45 seconds to render, which after a small amount of tweaking take less than 5 seconds to render.

That being said, it really pays not to skimp on GPU. Right up until the end of a project, most artists will spend >95% of their time in interactive display, and the number of polygons and textures they can push comfortably is directly determined by their graphics hardware.

I wouldn't tend to recommend any of the professional boards (Nvidia's Quadro line or ATI's FireGL) unless your friend is planning to get into really high-end stuff. The additional hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars pay for increased precision, which is handy if you're doing CAD but frankly not all that important for the average artist. I'd recommend he save his money and instead purchase either a mid-range or high-performance consumer card (any of the Geforce or Radeon line really should be fine for most folks).

Sooooo yeah... These days, you can basically just built a decent gaming rig, and it will also tend to be a pretty sound 3D workstation. It's a magical time we live in.

[Serapth]

Just to clarify, are you talking about a dedicated rendering machine, or are you talking about a general purpose CAD machine?

If its actual modellings/animating/texturing/(then rendering ) the bad news is, all things are pretty important, you need a bit of a beast of a machine. In order of importance, it would probably be your 3D card, RAM, CPU, although you really can't skimp anywhere along the line as your weakest link will show quickly.

If you are talking about a dedicated render box, then the GPU means virtually nothing ( although this is changing as GPUs can be used to help with renderering offline these days ), RAM and disk throughput are probably the most important factors for rendering. A quick multicore CPU will help, but I am not sure if 3d max's default renderer takes advantage of multiple cores.

[Serapth]

Sooooo yeah... These days, you can basically just built a decent gaming rig, and it will also tend to be a pretty sound 3D workstation. It's a magical time we live in.

This.

My run of the mill 1000$ box with a Radeon HD3870 is quite capable of running Maya, Max or Softimage with pretty damned dense meshes with super smoothness. Its funny to think the a gaming PC of today totally spanks what an old SGI could do at 20x the price.

I remember the day I ALMOST spend over 10 grand for an R5000 to get Power Animator, way back in the day.

The key though ( for a workstation ), just like a gaming machine... its only as good as its weakest link. Doing 3D on a gig of RAM would suck, as would using a GeForce 1 or 2 card ( even my HD2600 in my laptop is woefully shit ).

[muddi900]

CPU and memory are more important unless he is going to buy an OpenGL based card designed for rendering like an nVidia Quadro card or a 3D Labs Oxygen card.

I would say the best performance VS price would be the ASUS P5Q-E paired with either the Q6600 or preferably a Q9550 with 4GB of RAM minimum.

Quad cores are out. Most of them will eat up over 50% of his budget. Basically the dollar exchange rate and freight increase due to fuel prices has fucked us over like nobody's business. A mid end gaming rig will also cost the guy an arm and a leg.

Thanks guys for the advice.

[Vector]

My own experience suggests the more cores the better. Any decent GPU will be fine for the editor in 3D Studio which supports both OpenGL and Direct3D acceleration.

Once you actually render the scene though the GPU isn't utilized.

Hope that helps.