I was reading about speeding up database systems using hardware RAM accelerators (work) and that lead me to think about Carrara rendering of animations (hobby)...

Q1: Does Carrara get any faster if I have more ram or is the max ram used dependant on the size of the output render?

Q2: Has anyone used a RamDisk (software) for the Carrara swap drive and did it improve things?

e.g. http://www.amtsoftware.com/Ramdisk-Plus/

Q3: Has anyone used a RamDisk (hardware) for the Carrara swap drive and did it improve things?

e.g http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/83684/gigabyte-iram.html

Andyclon, I think I have heard of one person doing it, but can't remember who. Files get really large tho so I would think u would need at least 6GB to use it. U could try with less maybe 4, but going lower I don't think would work well.

Attached Link: Professor

I used RamDiskXP(R) Version 2.0 from Cenatek to create a 200mb disk.

The file was rendered in batch mode to uncompressed AVI, once from the hard disk and once from the ram disk.

Hard disk took 37min 0.89s

Memory disk took 37min 6.64s

So my conclusion from this is that a software based RAM disk is unlikely to improve rendering times with Carrara 5.0

From what I have seen the way the buffers and pagefile are used I couldn't see any benefit. It's not a real bottle neck in other words. That would only be in use of the program, anyway. The only thing that will speed a render is processors. Quantity and processing power...that's it. I would recommend an irradiance map tho. It helps.

Given that virtually any render (except for some small and simple scenes) will require more than 2Gb of RAM memory (the maximum any program can use), swapping can not be avoided.

Given that only 3Gb of RAM is supported in Windows anyhow a (software) RAM disk would not be of any use (it would need to be at least 4 Gb in size thus will require swapping).

A faster disk (a hardware RAM disk of at least 4 Gb) for the swap file could speed up things. But faster processors, more processors and 3 Gb of RAM would have more effect.

The 4 Gb is an estimate (more may be required, sometimes less may be needed).

I've not seen this high memory usage claimed. I've only 1GB Ram total and Carrara only seems to claim about 500mb for this image which as I mentioned is rendered at quite a small size. One thing that is quite unique about this is that the textures are nearly all procedural.

However, I agree that it would appear that raw processing power would seem to be more important for the performance here. This is infact backed up with an article from Intel who are bringing out a quad core processor next year.

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2006/08/27/parallel_worlds/1.html

Don't forget that those 64bit processors can access more than 4GB. There's also PAE memory but I've only ever seen that on servers.

Question? Is Carrara supported on these 64bit and dual core processors? Can it take advantage?

Generally textures are the largest memory consumers, so using procedural textures will reduce the memory requirements dramatically. The size of the render will have some impact as will the number of lights.

Carrara will use a dual core processor (during any render) (and should be able to use a quad core) and can use a network during batch renders. It is a 32 bit program, so it can only use 2GB max (with dual core memory use may increase to 3 GB max).

Most people are currently (and in the near future) running a 32 bit version of Windows. Although many people have a 64 bit processor, few actually use the capabilities. Even Vista can only access 4GB in some 64 bit versions, so you will need a motherboard capable of using more than 4Gb (currently rare), a version of a 64 bit OS and correct drivers (difficult) and a 64 bit version of the executables (very rare at the moment) to actually use more than 4GB. Within a few years this is all possible but for now we will have to accept the current limitations.

I'm just wondering if co processor video cards will work in reducing rendering times for VUE.

What I understand (more or less) about the video co processor  is that its CPU is dedicated to graphics and relieve the motherboard's CPU of that function.  The down side is that these cards are extremely expensive ($3000).

Does any one here have any experience with them and what software they support?

I would expect coprocessors to require specialist modifications to software. Some of the top end software uses that kind of technique I believe.