Expected Render Performance

michael_4214366

I have an alienware laptop with a 1070i, and tried doing a render of an 8.1 female with hair (the swizzle bob hair) and am not sure whether I'm seeing expected performance for that type of render.

it was a head and shoulders only shot - GPU-Z indicated 100% GPU usage, about 60% GPU memory usage. CPU was 30% and System RAM was about 50%.  The render took about 8 minutes with the render settings set to default.

Does this seem reasonable for this operation? (trying to figure out whether I'm going to have to bit the bullet and spend ridiculous $ on a better machine).

Thanks Much!

margrave

The render did not "take" eight minutes, since Iray renders can theoretically go for infinity. You rendered it with an optional algorithm that cancels the render when it thinks the noise is at an acceptable level. If the hair creates a lot of specular highlights (small, hot pixels), then it may keep the render going to try and clear them up.

Disable the Rendering Quality algorithm and just let it render on its own, then cancel it yourself when the noise level is acceptable. That's a much better way to gauge your GPU's performance.

If there are a lot of specular highlights, then you can turn the glossy parameters down in the hair's surfaces tab.

michael_4214366

Thank you so much for that guidance - pretty much saved me from having to buy a GPU in today's insane markets!

DrunkMonkeyProductions

Your numbers are about right for all default settings, other than your vram utilization seems high.

My system shows about 4GB sys ram, 2GB of vram, 13% cpu, and 100%gpu. To 95% convergence:5 minutes. Using a base g8f with the same hair and rendered at 1kx1k. Dead front head shot with camera at 0.3,166.06, 63.00.

Tesla m40(3072 cuda@947mhz(Base), Dual Xeon e5-2643(4c/8c x2(8/16 total). 96GB sys ram.

 

The main problem you're going to run into is the small amount of sys ram you have.

Unless i miss my guess, you've only got 8GB available, and that's going to require a lot of optimization and/or limited scale of your renders.

If your system can handel it, try upgrading the sys ram to 16GB-32GB or more. Unless you plan to do single character and limited envrionments you'll easily get to, or exceed, even 32GB.

If that's not an option, try checking ebay for a dell or hp workstation, or if you've got the room(and don't mind the noise) a server.  If you're in the U.S. you can get a pretty usable system for just a few hundred dollars and then have a coronary when you buy a gpu.

Be sure to check the tech specs on them as you can run into some issues down the road. The biggest are the ram capacity and whether the system supports above 4g decoding/Large BAR/MMIO. The latter has to do with using gpus, that have a lot of vram.

Certain older systems won't even boot if you try dropping a gpu with 12GB of vram, or run multiple smaller cards.

Don't go for less than a quad core, and get the highest, single core, speed you can find/afford.

Also, be sure to check what replacement parts are going for, as you can easily get to or exceed the price of a full system for just the cost of a powersupply or mobo.