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Anything new with rendering speed?


Leonard Marsh

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I timed the rendering of an eye level perspective and a bird's eye isometric from a single 10.4 meg file. There are lots of lights, shadows and 6-8 mapped photos in each view. I rendered with Final Quality RenderWorks and Custom RenderWorks. After adding two 512 meg chips, I re-timed the same renderings. There was no difference in the elapsed rendering time.

Past postings have noted additional RAM would help increase speed. So, why am I seeing no improvement in speed? Is there anything more I can do?

Thanks,

Leonard

Power Mac G4 800/133/1.28 gb SDRAM

Mac OS 10.2.2

VW/RW 10.0.1

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Leonard,

I have found that available RAM is not largely NOT used in rendering processes.

(Y.M.M.V. etc etc)

To see what is actually being used in OS10, go to

Applications/ Utilities/ CPU monitor; from the processes menu choose: Display Expanded Window, and also: Open Process Viewer. From the top right drop menu choose: User Processes, and then highlight VectorWorks. At the drop arrow at the lower left, choose: More Info, and hit the Statistics tab.

Now arrange the windows so you can see them when you start the Rendering.

The CPU monitor will show you a simple graph (in "real time") of how the CPU resources are being allocated and the Process viewer will give you details including RAM and Virt Memory usage.

Let us know what you find.

BTW, how long are your 10Mb renderings taking??

cheers,

N.

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Thanks propstuff & MikeB for the responses.

I tried the CPU monitor. Cool! And thanks! What do the two colors on the dynamic graph represent?

Also, what is "Y.M.M.V."?

Rendering times (H:M:S) per your request

Final Quality RW

G4 800, 1.28gb:

frontal perspective, 0:01:27; Isometric, 0:02:50.

G4 350, 512mb:

frontal perspective, 0:03:00; Isometric, 0:05:30.

Custom RW

G4 800, 1.28gb:

frontal perspective, 0:01:17; Isometric, 0:04:13.

G4 350, 512mb:

frontal perspective, 0:02:29; Isometric, 0:08:02.

Thanks,

Leonard

G4 800/1.28gb OS10.2.2 V/RW10.0.1

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Yep; processor speed.

See also my rant on the General board under :VW 10 on a brand new 800 mhz iBook? ;-)

I'd really be interested to see a tractor pull of a nice big render B/W a "Top spec" Mac and "equivalent" PC. But maybe that's just morbid.

quote:

I tried the CPU monitor. Cool! And thanks! What do the two colors on the dynamic graph represent?

Also, what is "Y.M.M.V."?

There are three colours actually. The top (larger) one is the application allocation, the lower one is the system allocation, and the lowest (which doesn't appear much) is um, er, um, I've forgotten. (System maintenance I think???)

"Your Mileage May Vary"; another of the many Bulletin Board abbreviations FWIW (For What It's Worth)

I quite enjoy watching the development of this dialect.

There's a Sociology Thesis in it for sure if you were keen :-))

Your rendering times don't seem that excessive really (if they are A4 sheet, hi-res, print quality renders) A couple of minutes seems modest for that. IMHO (In My Humble Opinion)

I wonder when the SMS generation will start talking in abbreviations? ;-))

cheers,

N.

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quote:

Originally posted by propstuff:

Yep; processor speed.........................I'd really be interested to see a tractor pull of a nice big render B/W a "Top spec" Mac and "equivalent" PC. But maybe that's just morbid.

N.

I've heard the new 3.2 Ghz Hyperthreading P4's are almost twice as fast as the Dual 1 Ghz Macs using the standard Photoshop benchmark tests. Which is interesting considering that Photoshop is a multithread app. I don't know, I really like OS X but to pay more for less speed seems a little strange to me.

I work cross platform (P3 800 Win98se at home, G4 800 OS 10.2.3 at work) and my employer is commited to apple for the long haul so It will be interesting to see how all this plays out over the next couple years.

[Wink]

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Hi MikeB & propstuff,

Actually, my first 800 clocked run was with 256 Mb followed by more runs after adding 1024 Mb. I was expecting an elapsed time decrease of 10%-25% and discovered literally no difference B/W 256 & 1024. That neither a graphics card nor additional memory reduces rendering times surprised me and led to these postings.

My time trials involved a rendering modest in size and complexity, however, I'm interested in the hardware/software/strategy of rendering files at least 10 times larger. The apparent BL (bottom line), for now, is that this is the wall for the current Mac & V/RWs. What about strategy for huge & complex files?

[quote: "Your Mileage May Vary"; another of the many Bulletin Board abbreviations FWIW (For What It's Worth)

I quite enjoy watching the development of this dialect.

There's a Sociology Thesis in it for sure if you were keen :-))]

Better yet, something voyeurs and the rest of us can always use, another user's manual. !?)

Cheers,

L.

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I just installed the sonnet 1Ghz upgrade in a G4 466. I expected to cut rendering times in half, but it's MUCH better than that.

I timed the rendering of a file on the 466 at 24 minutes.

Put in the upgrade, rendered the same file in 5 minutes.

No other changes to the system,app or file. Both tests done from a cold start in 9.2.2 running VW 8.5.2.

My conclusion is that the cache architecture of the processor has a large impact on rendering speeds. Either that or I'm a very bad bench-tester.

[ 01-05-2003, 02:17 PM: Message edited by: ccroft ]

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