Hardware selection - Worth upgrading and what to pick?

[PvdPol]

Dear all,

 

I'm new to the forums and i've tried to find my way in the already existing topics, such as

- https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html

- https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/21934-hardware-recommendations/?tab=comments#comment-179153

 

I could not find an answer yet, hopefully some of you can help me out.

I am currently struggling with Chief Architect Premier, ray traces are really slow at 1080P (1 pass takes like 15-30 min)

Also working for in PBR is making my system really really slow and it is getting frustrating.

My model is not complex and I think I need an hardware upgrade.

 

Current machine (Notebook - April 2014)

• X•BOOK 15CL56
• NVIDIA GTX770m 3GB, Full HD (+/- 20000 3DMARK)
• Intel® CoreTM i7-4710MQ (6M Cache, up to 3.50 GHz) - 47Watt (Quadcore)
• 16GB DDR3L (1600MHz)
   

New system specifications (not bought yet)

• AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Boxed
• MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max
• Crucial Ballistix Sport LT BLS2K16G4D30AESB  (32GB Ram)
• Intel 660p 1TB Solidstate drive
• Graphic card? Nvidia? Any Advice?

 

I think the 32 GB of memory is already an overkill, not sure if this is needed.

But I'm mostly wondering regarding the choice of CPU and Graphics card

 

Is this a good setup? What kind of performance improvements can I expect? What would be your advice?

 

Thank you!

 

Regards,
Peter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Renerabbitt]

20 minutes ago, PvdPol said:

Is this a good setup? What kind of performance improvements can I expect? What would be your advice?

My biggest question for hardware recommendations will always be; What other programs do you use and depend on?

Are you moving to a desktop from a laptop?

Hard drive is a big part of the equation, spring for an NVME drive or the SATA 4 based drives...there are some current threads on this if you limit a search by date.

32gb RAM is a must for me...I run a ton of temp files from various programs in RAM.

Single thread CPU speed makes for a Fast workflow...more cores for raytracing..find your balance. There are also people who charge small fees for renders outside software at a lower cost than it probably takes you to produce an inferior trace in CA(sorry Chief).

 

 

[PvdPol]

23 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

My biggest question for hardware recommendations will always be; What other programs do you use and depend on?

Are you moving to a desktop from a laptop?

 

Hi Rene, thanks for your quick reply, good question, priorities are:

1. Currently Chief Architect Premiere has the highest need of good hardware.
2. I use Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing (Preferably 4k if possible) (Hardware acceleration by Nvidia really helped)
3. I play games often on the playstation, but this is more because my current notebook is not sufficient anymore. Games would be nice though.

I'm moving from a laptop to a desktop indeed, currently using the laptop as a workstation with triple screen setup and barely use it as a laptop.

laptop will still be sufficient to move around with if needed.

 

23 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Hard drive is a big part of the equation, spring for an NVME drive or the SATA 4 based drives...there are some current threads on this if you limit a search by date.

 

 

Oke, I will have to look into this part.

 

 

Quote

Single thread CPU speed makes for a Fast workflow...more cores for raytracing..find your balance.

 

I value raytracing a lot, I would like to do as much iterations/ray traces as possible and would not be willing to use 3rd parties at the moment.

Your saying that in this case, the more cores the better? is there an maximum of cores CA uses?

 

Really appreciate your reply :).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Renerabbitt]

11 minutes ago, PvdPol said:

Really appreciate your reply

The setup you mentioned should be sufficient for Premier Pro, I have no input on cards, I typically use nVidia for its rendering capabilities. Yes more cores the better for traces, it is CPU dependent,  I have a 14 core that uses all cores on CA, but CA raytraces are terribly inefficient for me, I only use it to diagnose other users efforts in the endeavor.

Samsung 970 pro would be my top vote on drives

 

[rlackore]

I'm not smart enough to evaluate your current rig, but the best "upgrade" I ever made for renderings/raytraces is to use TwinMotion - I believe it's still a free download. TwinMotion is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot faster to set up a quality scene, the results are real-time, and the animations use keyframing. The export/import using .dae isn't fullproof, but I seldom run into issues, and refreshing the TwinMotion file after a change in Chief works well. The biggest advice I have for anyone using Chief with TwinMotion is to save any material tweaks you make in TwinMotion into your TwinMotion user library so you can quickly re-apply them if they are lost during the model refresh.

[PvdPol]

Thank you for your replies so far! With some research, this will be the machine so far:

 

Product			Price	Subtotal
		AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Boxed Processors	€ 335,-	€ 335,-
		Gigabyte X570 Aorus PRO Moederborden	€ 264,99	€ 264,99
		MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 6G OC Videokaarten	€ 360,50	€ 360,50
		Crucial Ballistix Sport LT BLS2K16G4D30AESB Geheugen intern	€ 150,89	€ 150,89
		Fractal Design ION+ 660W Platinum Voedingen	€ 117,90	€ 117,90
		Kingston A2000 1TB Solid state drives	€ 120,66	€ 120,66
		Totaal		€ 1.349,94

 

 

 

I ask myself the following, would I experience any difference between the following graphic cards?

The NVIDIA has 6gb of ram, the Radeon has 8gb.

 

#	Category	Product	Prijs	Subtotaal
1	Videokaarten	MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 6G OC	€ 360,50	€ 360,50
1	Videokaarten	Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 8G GDDR6	€ 349,-	€ 349,-

 

 

Looking forward to your reply!

 

 

Edited September 11, 2019 by PvdPol

[johnny]

3 hours ago, PvdPol said:

Thank you for your replies so far! With some research, this will be the machine so far:

 

Product			Price	Subtotal
		AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Boxed Processors	€ 335,-	€ 335,-
		Gigabyte X570 Aorus PRO Moederborden	€ 264,99	€ 264,99
		MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 6G OC Videokaarten	€ 360,50	€ 360,50
		Crucial Ballistix Sport LT BLS2K16G4D30AESB Geheugen intern	€ 150,89	€ 150,89
		Fractal Design ION+ 660W Platinum Voedingen	€ 117,90	€ 117,90
		Kingston A2000 1TB Solid state drives	€ 120,66	€ 120,66
		Totaal		€ 1.349,94

 

 

 

I ask myself the following, would I experience any difference between the following graphic cards?

The NVIDIA has 6gb of ram, the Radeon has 8gb.

 

#	Category	Product	Prijs	Subtotaal
1	Videokaarten	MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 6G OC	€ 360,50	€ 360,50
1	Videokaarten	Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 8G GDDR6	€ 349,-	€ 349,-

 

 

Looking forward to your reply!

 

 

 

I believe in Chief those cards would handle themselves fairly similarly. I've actually had good success with both Nvidia and AMD cards, and it may be just me but if I was doing an AMD processor built I would probably keep that theme throughout.  

[Kbird1]

With Hardware it is all about Budget   , to future proof some spend what you can ie you may want to consider the Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD and a RTX 2070 Super Vidoecard but that may add a 1/4 or 1/3 to your current total , the RTX Super will be better if you want to Game at higher frame rates along with Chief usage. 

 

Either way you should find things much better than your current setup 

 

M.

[Renerabbitt]

Nvidia for its optix denoiser for my workflow

[PvdPol]

1 hour ago, johnny said:

 

I believe in Chief those cards would handle themselves fairly similarly. I've actually had good success with both Nvidia and AMD cards, and it may be just me but if I was doing an AMD processor built I would probably keep that theme throughout.  

 

 

Hi Johnny, Thank you for your reply. 

I am thinking the same thing. Except that the standard cooling on the radeon 5700 is by reviews quite more noisy. Another card with other cooling is 40 euro's extra. But the 5700 appears to out perform the 2060 on higher settings. But this is al not that important. Noise is more important for me. I prefer having the AMD theme through out the pc too. Il go do some research regarding noice and maybe will add some custom cooler later. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Kbird1 said:

With Hardware it is all about Budget   , to future proof some spend what you can ie you may want to consider the Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD and a RTX 2070 Super Vidoecard but that may add a 1/4 or 1/3 to your current total , the RTX Super will be better if you want to Game at higher frame rates along with Chief usage. 

 

Either way you should find things much better than your current setup 

 

M.

 

Thanks for your reply! Budget is indeed the current "bottleneck" and I have to make some choices. I wonder if I would notice a difference in the 2060 and 2070 cards in Cap? , what do you think?  Would this be in the physical based rendering? 

 

Gaming is straight forward, the 2070 would do better. But the 5700 en 2060 are capable ennough for me regarding that aspect. 

 

 

 

 

[PvdPol]

Hello,

 

In the meanwhile i've ordered the components and put the machine together.

In the first place I had the AMD X 5700 Pulse graphics card, but somehow it seems like that Chief Architect x11 didn't work well with it.

My older laptop with Nvidia graphics out performed the much faster new card in Physical Rendering.

 

Therefore I exchanged the AMD graphics card with the Nvdia 2060 Super card and this works awesome.

 

Raytraces are 10-20 times quicker with the new CPU :).

 

 

Happy that I am back with Nvidia, but still curious if Chief indeed works better with nvidia instead of AMD...

 

 

 

 

[gsgriffin]

Just a thank you to everyone on this thread.

 

Really, this question should be asked and answered every 6 months. I'm upgrading my system now and already did the research and came to almost the exact same equipment list.  It will be a little cheaper now than 7 months ago, of course, but I feel those items are still the best bang for the buck.

 

Can I just ask after 7 months if there is anything that is not quite up to the task or anything you would have purchased instead?

[PvdPol]

Hi, 

 

I would change nothing to the setup, I do think that the graphics card is an overkill. 

 

As far as my models go, my graphics card is only getting utilized during ray-traces and it is not getting stresssed at al. 

 

Cpu and Ram is most important. 

[Kbird1]

15 minutes ago, PvdPol said:

Hi, 

 

I would change nothing to the setup, I do think that the graphics card is an overkill. 

 

As far as my models go, my graphics card is only getting utilized during ray-traces and it is not getting stresssed at al. 

 

Cpu and Ram is most important. 

 

I think you'll be happy for 2060 RTX Card when Chief gets around to supporting Directx12 Ultimate/Nvidia's RTX technology ....hopefully in X13.....

The prices should be coming down on the 2000 Series Cards since the 3000 Series will release Q3 or Q4

 

Raytracing is done with the CPU, so the number of Cores helps there ...

 

as for AMD cards I have seen a number of issues lately mostly on Macs with Radeon Cards that were very slow....

 

M.

[PvdPol]

Sorry, I made a mistake in my last post. I mean physical based rendering instead of ray-tracing. You are right. 

 

Interessting, would be great if it gets there in x13. 

 

I am cured for AMD for a while.. Always a loyal customer to nvidia, tried the AMD card but came with a lot of driver and stability issues. Lots of People really happy with these cards who know what to modify, but I didnt had the time for that. Got back to nvidia and happy now. 

 

Regards, 

P.