How many cores/threads can Chief use for rendering?

[BobBoyer]

I'm building a new PC for Chief rendering work. I have three workstations that perform pretty well for design, but high quality renderings are painfully slow and tie up the machine they are on. With new AMD processors now coming with up to 64 cores (holy cow!) I'm wondering if there is a practical limit to how many cores/threads Chief can utilize for rendering purposes. Also, is there a sweet spot for CPU/RAM/GPU specs that people agree gives great performance/dollar with X11/12?

 

Thanks for any discussion/tips you can offer. 

[BobBoyer]

Yes. I should have been more clear. I suppose it would be pretty cool if the hardware was capable enough to render watercolor in realtime too... Probably a pipe dream though. 

[Ridge_Runner]

Graham @TheKitchenAbode has done a considerable amount of work in this area. Maybe he will show up and give you some of his findings. You can search the forum for his threads in this area - lots of good info in them.

 

[TheKitchenAbode]

39 minutes ago, BobBoyer said:

I'm building a new PC for Chief rendering work. I have three workstations that perform pretty well for design, but high quality renderings are painfully slow and tie up the machine they are on. With new AMD processors now coming with up to 64 cores (holy cow!) I'm wondering if there is a practical limit to how many cores/threads Chief can utilize for rendering purposes. Also, is there a sweet spot for CPU/RAM/GPU specs that people agree gives great performance/dollar with X11/12?

 

Thanks for any discussion/tips you can offer. 

 

If you are using CA Raytrace then the more cores the better as it is 100% CPU based and scales up according to the number of CPU cores you have. If you are planning to use CA's PBR rendering camera then your graphics card is the most important item by far, CPU cores are not as important. There are other third party renders that use both, so they will use everything you can through at them.

 

In general with Raytrace if you double the cores you will reduce your time in half, double it again and now it will run in 1/4 the time. Another bonus with these newer processors is that they can run their cores at higher base frequency than older CPU's, so there's another performance bonus.

[lbuttery]

CA has stated the more cores the merrier

 

probably best to chat with tech support on that to be sure of avoiding overkill

 

Lew

[TheKitchenAbode]

You may wish to read this article.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/What-is-the-Best-CPU-for-Rendering-2019-1643/

 

They have many other articles covering a wide range of rendering and photo editing application performance in respect to hardware configurations.

[Renerabbitt]

It's a dead platform but for Raytracing in CA, it's hard to beat the X99 Xeon processors on bang-for-the-buck. They can be purchased on eBay for pennies.

My rendering machine uses a chip that can be found for $300 on eBay and this machine recently benched 19th globally overall from available benchmarks for the rendering software I use. I've really gotten my money's worth. I'll probably build another one in a couple years.

Easy to draft in a fast laptop and kick it over to the desktop for rendering.

If you'd prefer the PBR method you should definitely take a look at some of @TheKitchenAbodePBR threads in the forums

[BobBoyer]

Great! Thanks everyone for the information and advice. I appreciate it.