Rendering speed

[John Erren]

Hi there, I have just purchased a brand new iMac Pro to try and improve the basic rendering speed... unfortunately very little difference to my MacBook Pro laptop that I was running it from. Is anything being done to try and improve these rendering speeds. Even when I use interior elevations viewports and make changes ... to update them seems to take forever. I have been using Vectorworks and InteriorCad for at least 8 years but it just seems to get slower all the time...??? Does anyone else have these problems and have you found a solution?? 

[michaelk]

Welcome to the forum.

 

Jim Wilson wrote a few tips on rendering:  

 

 

He also had more tips at the last Design Summit in Phoenix.  I don't know if that talk is available.

 

In general I find that keeping light sources to a minimum helps a lot.  I'm not sure if the size of textures matters, but I also try to not create textures with large images.

 

I also find interior elevations to be slow.  If you're doing hidden line elevations, make sure you don't have the smoothing angle set to 0.  Between 20 and 30 is usually the sweet spot for me.

[John Erren]

7 minutes ago, michaelk said:

Welcome to the forum.

 

Jim Wilson wrote a few tips on rendering:  

 

 

He also had more tips at the last Design Summit in Phoenix.  I don't know if that talk is available.

 

In general I find that keeping light sources to a minimum helps a lot.  I'm not sure if the size of textures matters, but I also try to not create textures with large images.

 

I also find interior elevations to be slow.  If you're doing hidden line elevations, make sure you don't have the smoothing angle set to 0.  Between 20 and 30 is usually the sweet spot for me.

 

I don't usually use any lighting for that reason... I am just hoping that in the next service pack they pick up the speed .... it's for me one the the most important things. I literally sit in front of my computer waiting for 5+ seconds for every time I make a change and want to check in the Interior Elevations. 5 seconds + might not sound a lot.... but when you do this 100 times a day it feels forever!!

[michaelk]

3 minutes ago, John Erren said:

5 seconds + might not sound a lot.... but when you do this 100 times a day it feels forever!!

 

 

Agreed!!!!

[Kevin McAllister]

15 hours ago, John Erren said:

Hi there, I have just purchased a brand new iMac Pro to try and improve the basic rendering speed... unfortunately very little difference to my MacBook Pro laptop that I was running it from. Is anything being done to try and improve these rendering speeds. Even when I use interior elevations viewports and make changes ... to update them seems to take forever. I have been using Vectorworks and InteriorCad for at least 8 years but it just seems to get slower all the time...??? Does anyone else have these problems and have you found a solution?? 

 

Are you rendering sheet layer viewports or in the design layers?

 

Unfortunately my experience is similar to yours. I think that upgrading to an iMac Pro accentuates the bottlenecks in VW. Until the upgrades to the core components are complete (switching items to the VGM or removing single core bottlenecks like math/geometry calculations) I think it is what it is for more complex models.

 

Kevin

 

[herbieherb]

The iMac Pro isn't worth the money for vectorworks. Get yourself a threadripper rendermachine instead. Or at least wait until apple brings out its new MacPro.

[zoomer]

It depends.

You can also go with a standard iMac 2019 that also suits very well.

 

The $800+ for the equivalent iMac Pro include :

- 10 Gb Ethernet (vs 1Gb)

- XEONs (+ 10/14/18 cores)

- EEC RAM max 256 GB (vs 128 GB)

- 4x USB C TB with more lanes (vs 2x)

- more GPU options with more VRAM (4x 4k Monitors vs 2x)

- 1080p FaceTime Camera (vs 720p)

- 4x Microphones (vs 2x)

- non-really-accessible RAM slots (vs a Door)

 

If someone is interested in one or other feature.

Edited April 26, 2019 by zoomer

[Kevin McAllister]

26 minutes ago, zoomer said:

It depends.

You can also go with a standard iMac 2019 that also suits very well.

 

The $800+ for the equivalent iMac Pro include :

- 10 Gb Ethernet (vs 1Gb)

- XEONs (+ 10/14/18 cores)

- EEC RAM max 256 GB (vs 128 GB)

- 4x USB C TB with more lanes (vs 2x)

- more GPU options with more VRAM (4x 4k Monitors vs 2x)

- 1080p FaceTime Camera (vs 720p)

- 4x Microphones (vs 2x)

- non-really-accessible RAM slots (vs a Door)

 

If someone is interested in one or other feature.

 

I bought mine refurbished from Apple. The price was more manageable and in line with the top end iMac.

 

Kevin

 

[herbieherb]

You pay a lot for things that bring absolutely no benefits for vectorworks. 10gb ethernet will not make your project-sharing any faster. The bottleneck is the single core cpu score. The slowed down xeons are performing really bad for single-core tasks and with multicore tasks the threadripper kills it anyhow. ECC ram does not bring any more stability to vectorworks. The graphics-card has a lot of cores but it's slow clocked. A gaming-card woul'd suit way better for vectorworks. All in all, a fully featured iMac Pro only delivers a small amount of the power of a threadripper into vectorworks, but costs many times as much.

I would only recommend it if you need the parts for other software. Vectorworks will perform very well on it. But the iMac Pro just isn't worth the money for Vectorworks alone.

[zoomer]

Aren't even the outdated Xeon W's still faster in single core speed than

all current AMDs ?

 

A bit outdated table :

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Cinema-4D-CPU-Comparison-Skylake-X-vs-Threadripper-1017/

[Luis M Ruiz]

@John Erren Hi John. Creating renderings is always a balance between viewport size, sheet resolution and settings. For example, if you have a sheet 36"x24", 300dpi and viewport at best quality, including displacement mapping, it'll take a long, long time to process.

 

If you are just in the process of previewing your renderings, trade size and quality for speed. Perhaps reducing those renderings to 17"x11"  at 72dpi and make use of Custom Renderworks, most of them at low quality including 1 reflection.

 

Once you are super happy with the quality, go high on Custom Renderworks and increase your sheet res to 300dpi. Some settings are different in case of interiors. Post a pict of what you are trying to create and I may have a similar file you can take a look at in terms of settings.

[herbieherb]

You're right. In single-core tasks the Xeon is superior to the Threadripper. Unfortunately this doesn't make much difference for the performance in Vectorworks in practice. Except that you get a bit more performance out of OpenGL, you don't notice much in your daily work. With the vast majority of other single-core tasks you don't notice any difference, because the bottleneck is not the single-core speed of the processor.  Anyway, that doesn't justify betting on the nearly $1000 more expensive processor. Especially because we are talking about a rendering workstation and here the threadripper can score again with its multicore performance.
The iMac-Pro as a rendering workstation is simply too expensive for the performance it delivers in Vectorworks. I'd definitely wait to see what the next (hopefully modular) MacPro will bring.

[zoomer]

Yes, overall, beside Rendering, I don't notice much difference between

my old nMac Pro and the new Ryzen.

But for those extra long single core tasks like imports and exports

it is quite noticeable though.