I'm trying to improve the render time for my poser 2012 files. I recently went from a XFX Radeon 4890 1 Gb to a XFX Radeon 6950 2 Gb card but only shaved 30 sec. off a figure render that took 4 min for the older card - Should I have gotten the RAM instead?

(currently 12Gb but was thinking of going to the 32Gb max for my motherboard)

Looking forward to your feedback.

Poser doesn't use much of the video card, so getting another one is, as you observed, not going to gain you much. RAM should gain you the most. Poser also uses a lot of processor. The better the processor, the faster it should run.

Laurie

my 2C: use Taskmanager to find out if RAM is limiting you. 12Gb is quite a lot already.

You might want the max CPU-power for your motherboard (or change that too). My supplier (who delivers performace edge systems to the media industry) currently offers i7-3930K for workstations and dual Xeon E5-2640 for industrials. Start overclocking first. Xeons are like workhorses with a race horse engine, preferred for long lasting heavy duty jobs.

When, in due time, you want to use LuxRender or another GPU-deploying renderer you will profit best from high end professional video cards, like nVidea Quadro. They are to normal cards like Xeons are to normal CPU's.

But before throwing money; why do you need to improve render times? I tend to render in the background queue, or overnight, or during lunch and dinner breaks, to squeeze the max out of my current setup.

all the best

One thing that usually never gets brought up on render times, is all the garbage that is running in the background on a lot of systems.

A lot of brand name systems have tons of stuff running in the background that can slow the system down considerably when one program wants to use most of the cpu time.

To add insult to injury, many programs will undo any changes you make next time you update them as well.

The amount of memory in a system can be misleading as well. You could have 64 gig of memory and that may not help depending on the speed and channel setup of the memory. You are far better off getting the fastest memory your motherboard supports than getting more of the slower stuff. If you mix memory, all of it will run at the speed of the slowest chip, and internal height/width differences can slow it down even more. Contrary to popular belief, not all memory is created equal.

For a program like Firefly, the number of physical cores used is the first key to render speed, memory speed is second. The number of cores is also a dimishing return. A cpu with 12 cores still only has one pathway to the main memory. So if you want a cpu like that, get one with as much cache as you can.

Overclocking can drastically improve render times, but you better know what you are doing when you set it up. Finding the proper voltage settings can take some time to get right. You also risk making a very expensive paperweight as well. If the motherboard in your system is not designed to be overclocked, get one that is.

Setting the cpu power to max is not the best advise, I have motherboards that would fry the cpu at max power. It is scary how much you can turn the voltage up on some motherboards. Cooling needs to be properly addressed before you turn up any voltages. Not just the cpu either, everything plugged into it will get hotter.

Just remember, overclocking will burn it up, when depends on how it is set up and how far it is overclocked. Many people will say that it wont, but it will at some point. If it is done right, it may last for years, do it wrong and it might burn up as you are setting it up.

Quote - When, in due time, you want to use LuxRender or another GPU-deploying renderer you will profit best from high end professional video cards, like nVidea Quadro.

This is no longer true at all. A Quadro is a snail compared to a Tesla or the new high end gaming cards. If you do not need the stuff that only a quadro can do, why buy it?

If you do not need crazy high screen resolution, a Tesla card will blow a Quadro 6000 away, for half the price. If you need huge screen resolution, the new GTX680 is the way to go. They have 1536 Cuda cores, and they are SLI capable as well. And you can buy 4 of them for and still have money left over vs a Quadro.

Quote - > Quote - When, in due time, you want to use LuxRender or another GPU-deploying renderer you will profit best from high end professional video cards, like nVidea Quadro.

This is no longer true at all. A Quadro is a snail compared to a Tesla or the new high end gaming cards. If you do not need the stuff that only a quadro can do, why buy it?

If you do not need crazy high screen resolution, a Tesla card will blow a Quadro 6000 away, for half the price. If you need huge screen resolution, the new GTX680 is the way to go. They have 1536 Cuda cores, and they are SLI capable as well. And you can buy 4 of them for and still have money left over vs a Quadro.

2k on graphics cards..... I wish. Your electric bill should go up too. lol

Just one of them should max out almost any game out there.

 Does luxrender use more than one card?

The CPU I'm using is an i7 920 2.67 Gz

I also forgot to mention that the render setting is set to max for seeing what some textures would look like prior to putting a character into a scene.

So maybe I'm getting a bit impatient.

Thanks for the replies so far.

When discussing "speed", showing your render settings "does" help.

As said... look what runs in the background... You would be scared if you knew.....

Want speed???
Clean, clean clean........

Quote - I also forgot to mention that the render setting is set to max for seeing what some textures would look like prior to putting a character into a scene.

That is probably part of the problem, the slider for render settings is not the best for render speed or quality.

There are more than a few threads ob here about using the manual render settings in the different versions of Poser.

bagginsbill has posted tons of information on it here.

Again - Thanks for the responces

have you set your number of threads in Poser preferences ?

try running the task manager to see what resources are being used.

More ram is not going to make your system faster, you've got a lot already, adding more will not give you a noticable decrease of rendering times. The new GPU will not either. The only thing that will give give gain is a faster CPU or perhaps changing rendering settings.

Cleaning up your system and shutting down some stuff that runs in the background may help, but with the amount of RAM you have, I doubt it. You need to find out 2 things......

1. How much RAM is being used when Poser is rendering. If it stays well under 12GB then cleaning up and such or adding RAM will not do much at all. I've looked at your gallery and I doubt any of these image took up the full 12BG when rendering.

2. Are all of your coures maxed out when rendering? If not, find out how many threads you do have in total and set Poser to use all of them. If all of them are used already, then there's only one thing left to do.... get a faster CPU and hope for faster rendering times. With what you've got, the money you have to pay will probably not justify the faster rendering times you do get.

You would do better by overclocking your processor by tweaking your bios. Info is all over the net about how to accomplish this.

With proper cooling most 920's will overclock to around 4ghz without worry of frying it.

Heat is what kills them.

And make sure hyperthreading is enabled.  Should be by default but you never know.

Just going from 2.6ghz to 3.6ghz will make a huge difference in render times.

I have a 2.4ghz processor running at 3.8ghz and its been running that way for a couple yrs now.

http://overclock.net/

Get a 970/980  and don't worry about all that oc stuff hex cores rule for 1366 power

12 threads of rendering madness