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Kickass render machine?


Ryan Seybert

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I'm currently in the market for a new machine for that will take on the rending work loads.

 

The research I've done so far has lead me to believe that the CPU specs are what matter to rendering in VW and that a CPU with less cores and higher speed would be the best purchase.

 

Can anyone recommend some desktop machines that make light work of complex renderings?  MAC preferred but Open to Windows.

 

Thanks.

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More cores and higher clocks speeds on the CPU will be the most beneficial to rendering performance in Vectorworks. In terms of "Kickass" performance I would look into AMD 3900X or Intel i9-9900K processors and possibly work your way up to Threadripper, Epyc, Xeon processors if budget allows. 

One other thing worth considering is that Vectorworks is continuing to integrate with other programs for rendering that utilize the graphics card much more than Vectorworks does. For example, if you plan on picking up Vision, a good graphics card will help your rendering performance. 

 

I recently put together a suggested build for a client with roughly a $3000 budget. You can get a great machine for much less than this, but this will give you an idea of a higher spec machine. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/wNzpb8 

 

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When it comes to cpu-Rendering nothing beats the threadripper cpu atm because it has a lot of cores combined with high clock rate.

Here i introduced a built with an 18 core/32 threads threadripper 1950x in 2018. The hardware is of course outdated but the technical statements about CPU rendering are still correct. In the meantime I also built a 32 core/64 threads threadripper 2990wx which nearly doubled the rendering speed. Soon (maybe this year/maybe january) AMD will release the new generation of threadrippers. Rumours say it's gonna have up to 64 core/128 threads. No Mac computer comes even close to this CPU rendering power. The maxed out new MacPro will be just equipped with 28 core/ 56 threads at almost the same boost clock rate but much slower base clock. Also the price of a threadripper built is very interesting. For the price of a full-featured threadripper computer you would get just half a Xeon 28 core processor.

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@BSeigel - Thanks for the reply.  I'm really confused about what resources VW uses for which processes.  I've found posts that support it would be more beneficial to have a CPU with low core counts and high clock speed as VW does not utilize more than 3 or 4 cores... Granted almost all of these posts are older and I'm not sure just how relevant they are.  I cannot seem to find anything that touches this subject that are current to 2019/2020 and the recommended specs on the VW website does not get very granular when it comes to processor.  Do you have any links to any official resources that support the claim that more cores is beneficial?  That would really help my fight when I present the needs to the money people as well as help other users who are in the same boat.

 

@herbieherb - Thanks for the recommendations.  I will look into those specs.  I'm Mac based personally and on the road, but I'd be happy to rock a windows machine in the office if it means I can bang out some high quality renders in a timely manner.  The i9 processor I have in the MBP seems to do this pretty well but I have to drop the overall size of the final render down quite a bit while keeping the DPI high as well as sacrifice some of the finer details such as light bounces.

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Most tasks in Vectorworks are single-core or use less than 4 cores. This means a processor with less cores but higher clock-speed performs better on this tasks. This performance gain is limited due to the code of Vectorworks. You'll feel not much difference between a 3.0 GHz and a 5.0 GHz Processor while working on single-core tasks. One exception is the OpenGL Mode on which the graphiccard profits of the faster processor resulting in faster OpenGL-View.

The cinerender engine uses all cores while a doubled core-count means about a doubled renderspeed. When you render often you'll want to have a lot of cores, when you render rarely the money you spend for the additional cores may not pay off. The threadripper 2990wx is more than twice as fast for rendertasks than the i9 9900. The new threadripper 3 with 64 cores could be about 5 times faster. But does this justify the 1000-2000 higher cost?  It surely does when rendering is a common task you do when working. It can save you hours of rendering time a week.

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In our office we use a hybrid B.I.M. approach to our projects.   This means that we are using life building sections, elevations, wall sections and interior elevations.   When generating a publish set a lot time is spent updating viewports.   

Am I correct in thinking that the elevations that use a renderworks style will take advantage of all available cores?  Therefore more cores better.

What about the live building sections what part of my computer system would I need to improve to have have faster update times for out of date viewports.  CPU cores,  CPU clock speed,  or graphics card.

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If it's OpenGL as a rendering style for viewports, you want a great graphics card.  Hidden line/dashed hidden is all CPU, and I believe is still single core although I could be wrong there.  You can usually tell if your viewports' rendering style is using the CPU because you will see the render being built one chunk at a time, which is how the cores are "bucketing" the render.  

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