Looking for suggestions for custom PC for use with Poser 10 & Lux Renderer

Mizdimma

New member
Hi,

I am a digital artist, and currently I am in the process of getting a list of parts together so I can start buying them soon. My current rig is a dino, 2002. It has served well, but rendering on it is atrocious.

I need advice on parts, that will give me lightning fast render times. I very seldomly play games on PC, this is more for work with my art,running second life which is where I make a lot of content for sale, and possibly animations. My current programs used is mainly Poser for rendering, but I do wish to start using Lux Renderer to get more realistic quality renders, the only problem in obtaining that is my slowness in ability to render an image with Lux. Currently with my pc it takes at least 12 hours in Lux just to get what I can render out in Poser in a few hours.

So I ask, the main components I would need to achieve this request in cutting my render times down greatly.

Motherboard:
Processor:
Ram:
Graphics Card:
ect:

I have very little knowledge of what parts do what as to how it effects my times for rendering.

Any help will be appreciated greatly.

Also, does cores in the processor have anything to do with speed of computing the render?

Again thanks in advance for any help.

Miz
 
Looking at the packages, at least Poser 10, is open GL so you can use a gpu to accelerate that a little and depending on how much budget ya have or require either a gtx 770 780 780ti 970 980 or any of the titan range with out going further into the quadro and tesla cards.
 
We need a budget and do you need a W7/8 disk, monitor,keyboard/mouse, and are you doing an ssd+hdd or just a large single hdd?

As for the GPU. Lux Renderer seems to favor AMD cards(based off an article i read about them) because they offer better OpenCL support. As for Poser though, either cards work great since it uses mainly OpenGL. I'd still stick with AMD though since you can get the best in one and still maintain a high level of performance in the other.
 
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I was hunting for that on their site lol good find, but ii was hunting for the GPU support lol should not need much more than an i7, with 8-32Gb of ram and then maybe an SSD for boot with mech drives in raid maybe, for data storage
 
Yeah budget would be good but as a basis your going to need CPU cores, plenty of RAM, a decent GPU as well.

As for storage, whats more reliable for him an HDD or an SSD, that I'm not so great with so someone would need to advise you on that.
 
This is pretty much order parts when i can afford them. I am not limiting it to a budget per say. But would like to stay within ball park of 1500, plus or minus 100. As for monitor I only need a single monitor, no dual monitors needed, mouse and keyboard I can get by with minimal, it just needs to work for mousing around dials for morphs on the 3d characters and fine tuning the scenes.

My main need is speed for quality renders. I am about to embark upon a project which will require me to render a lot in a short amount of time. While I can get away with rendering 800x800 100 dpi for it, I would like to better the quality of the renders which at my pc's current age is impossible for the size I want to render at 2048x2048 max 300 dpi.

I also do designs for our Zazzle & Cafe Press and some of the specs for the larger scaled items exceed what I can output.

---------------

Thank you all for your replies and help in this matter of which I know bare minimal of.
 
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First thank you for the link. Looked at it, could you possible give some insight on how the crossfire on the cards work? Is it like when one fills the other takes over while it dumps the cache or something like a boost to the speed of the graphics, working at the same time? Will do a search on it as well.

Also, question on quad core and 32 bit programs, will it only use a few cores or all? I haven't upgraded to Pro on Poser yet, and 10 is 32 bit. Would there be a substantial difference on the way it performs?
 
We need a budget and do you need a W7/8 disk, monitor,keyboard/mouse, and are you doing an ssd+hdd or just a large single hdd?

As for the GPU. Lux Renderer seems to favor AMD cards(based off an article i read about them) because the offer better OpenCL support. As for Poser though, either cards work great since it uses mainly OpenGL. I'd still stick with AMD though since you can get the best in one and still maintain a high level of performance in the other.

I think this bench is the same thing so yes it does favour AMD cards.

I lifted this off another forum.

I2BjyJA.jpg


yXFsLFt.jpg
 
I assume they would treat it as general data like a game calculation.

And i dont think those 32 bit programs will run well or at all on 64 bit.
but im happy to be corrected.

And i went for 2x290 rather than 290X due to the cost ... and you can OC the 290's a little.
 
Also, question on quad core and 32 bit programs, will it only use a few cores or all? I haven't upgraded to Pro on Poser yet, and 10 is 32 bit. Would there be a substantial difference on the way it performs?

And i dont think those 32 bit programs will run well or at all on 64 bit.
but im happy to be corrected.

32bit applications just limit memory usage to 2GB (3GB with LAA flag) - won't affect cores.
They also run completely fine on 64bit.
 
Get 64bit OS. 64bit OS can use any application whether it be 64bit ot 32bit. 32bit OS can only use 32bit apps and not 64bit ones. Best to get the 64bit so you never have to worry about which programs can be used. Also cost the same

Gonna list parts for you here to look at. Your location says USA so i'll go off of that based on product availabilty/pricing. You never said what kind of resolution/size you would like on the monitor, so i'll stick with 1080p. If you already have a 1080p monitor then just disregard it.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/rsmVZL

I went with a R9 285 over the R9 290 because it put me just over budget with a 290. I found the 285 for over $100 cheaper at only $185 which is a steal at that price. I also went with Haswell-E because it wasn't much more than a normal 4970. Also the added DDR4 and 2 extra cores will allow you to maintain a very high end rig for rendering for a long time. Meaning less upgrading save money in long run.

Also just a tip windows 7. If you go ebay and you can usually find a full license 64bit Home Premium edition for less than $100.. i'd go with that over an OEM version.
 
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http://pcpartpicker.com/p/rsmVZL

I went with a R9 285 over the R9 290 because it put me just over budget with a 290. I found the 285 for over $100 cheaper at only $185 which is a steal at that price. I also went with Haswell-E because it wasn't much more than a normal 4970. Also the added DDR4 and 2 extra cores will allow you to maintain a very high end rig for rendering for a long time. Meaning less upgrading save money in long run.

He's going to want maximum OpenCL performance, 2 290s I'd aim for. DDR4 is pretty useless tbh as even in synthetic benchmarks there ain't much difference between that and DDR3, but the extra cores will help for CPU rendering.
 
So with looking at the graphics cards for the gpu acceleration whats the difference between double cards with double crossfire , and the double dissipation one?

This might be a dumb question but what exactly are the main pc parts which effect 3d rendering the most?

Thanks for the help y'all.
 
So with looking at the graphics cards for the gpu acceleration whats the difference between double cards with double crossfire , and the double dissipation one?

This might be a dumb question but what exactly are the main pc parts which effect 3d rendering the most?

Thanks for the help y'all.

This page should clear things up www.luxrender.net/wiki/GPU
 
He's going to want maximum OpenCL performance, 2 290s I'd aim for. DDR4 is pretty useless tbh as even in synthetic benchmarks there ain't much difference between that and DDR3, but the extra cores will help for CPU rendering.

I wasn't aware it took advantage of 2 cards? I haven't found anything to suggest it has at least.. If he decides for this then it'll change the specs of the rig entirely. Unless he buys one then later gets another. I know the DDR4 won't help much, i really only did it for the cores.

So with looking at the graphics cards for the gpu acceleration whats the difference between double cards with double crossfire , and the double dissipation one?

This might be a dumb question but what exactly are the main pc parts which effect 3d rendering the most?

Thanks for the help y'all.

Well as you put it, double cards/double crossifre, is actually labaled as Crossfire. Crossfire is when two GPUs work together to speed up processing. Nothing complex:)

Double Dissipation is just the 3rd party vendor (XFX) naming there card. It's just a marketing name for the card. Has nothing to do with Crossfire.

Main parts that effect 3d rendering are CPU,GPU, Ram. A slow hard drive won't effect the render speed but it'll effect importing/exporting models and overall system response. But again the actual core rendering it won't effect.
 
I wasn't aware it took advantage of 2 cards? I haven't found anything to suggest it has at least.. If he decides for this then it'll change the specs of the rig entirely. Unless he buys one then later gets another. I know the DDR4 won't help much, i really only did it for the cores.

Have a look at the page I linked above. They test with 3x 7950s, so this suggests that it does :). OpenCL does not use crossfire though, it simply allows the developer to run separate kernels on each GPU.
 
Ok, thanks for the link, It has been a while since I have been over to lux. And thanks for the clarification on the meaning of crossfire. I saw it was confused if they did the same thing or if it was a different thing altogether.

It will probably be a few months before I can start getting the parts and that will all depend on my sales, ect.

I did find a pc in a search which had 18 cores, my son said that was overkill, but it peaked my interests.

If I may ask this is off topic, but my pc the dino has encountered a problem just tonight, I haven't been able to get it booted up. The power stick which has the plugs to it, got flicked off, I tried restarting it, but it turns on, gets power to the monitor, then dies. I was looking inside and noticed a 3 volt battery which probably hasn't been changed since it was made, So I changed it, it started up, but when I placed it back in it's spot and reattached all the wires, same problem, turns on and dies.

When it rains it pours. Anyways, thanks for all the help and advice.

-----------------------

Ok sorry never mind about the pc, I managed to get it to start back up. and I figured out the culprit. Which was the power button in the front stuck. Sorry I feel rather small at the moment, LOL.
 
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18 cores is way too much. The rig i linked earlier is solid but room for improvement. I was only going based off of $1500. Take a look if you haven't already.
 
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