On 26/07/13 20:19, John Andersen wrote:

On 7/26/2013 11:42 AM, Dylan wrote:

...

Hi All,

I'm helping a friend replace his old Windows Vista machine which died in the heatwave. He does a lot of 3d art with blender (which has been terminally slow under vista.) I've provided a temporary Linux box (actually my testbed machine: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with 2G ram, which is already faster than his old quad core with 4G) and I'm hoping that by the time he gets a new machine he won't want Windows on it...

The 3d art is a hobby and the budget is limited. I'll be using his existing graphics card and 'on-board' sound will be more than adequate. So, which aspects of the spec are likely to have the most impact? I'm assuming more cores and more memory, but which would have the most impact for cost? Is there an appreciable difference between AMD and Intel chips? Are there any other aspects of the motherboard that might have a bearing on rendering speeds?

Any and all comments welcome.

Dylan

So I'm guessing it was his motherboard that died, or was it his power supply?

Well, it's a 5-ish year old box which has been getting steadily flakier for the last year or so - it suffered a heat death due to the heatsink detaching from the processor ...

Is he buying a new machine or simply replacing parts?

It'll be a motherboard/CPU/memory bundle - the PSU, HDs and graphics card have all been replaced within the last year.

In either case, Memory is cheap so 4 gig to 6 gig makes sense. 8 or 12 is not unreasonable.

And depending on the capabilities of Blender, more actual cores may be better, but on the other hand if it can use GPU cores (from the Video card) the CPU cores may be less important than the cores on the Graphics card. (You can tell I know nothing about Blender, but I've done a lot of Ray Tracing in the past).

Blender has its own native render engine which will use as many cores as available. There are add-in render engines which can use the GPU cores but they dominate the machine (the graphics card can't update the display while processing...) and it can pass rendering off to external applications like povray or yafaray or to a rendering server/farm.

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On 29/07/13 14:28, Rajko wrote:

On Fri, 26 Jul 2013 22:26:16 +0100 Dylan wrote:

...

Blender has its own native render engine which will use as many cores as available.

Right, if card is Nvidia. For AMD cards it is not so bright. My AMD does not work for rendering.

I'm talking about the native render engine which uses the CPU, not the 'cycles' engine which *can* use CUDA or openCL if configured to do so.

Also, it will use as much memory as it is available on the card, not in the system. Bad news is that graphic cards with a lot of memory are also top models with high prices.

Even his most complex render uses less than 1G peak memory (as reported by blender and htop...) Do you use CUDA? I've been trying to get it going on 12.2 all day. Although blender allows me to specify GPU rendering, it still only uses the CPU... Dylan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:26:53 +0100 Dylan wrote:

Do you use CUDA? I've been trying to get it going on 12.2 all day. Although blender allows me to specify GPU rendering, it still only uses the CPU...

I don't have Nvidia GPU (yet), so I get only CPU based rendering which takes much longer even for common 24" resolution of 1980x1080. A friend has GPU rendering and it is way faster then mine. What is your graphic card? -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org