Using 3D Accelerator Cards

lmoroney

Has anybody tried adding 3D accelerator cards to their PC in order to improve render time? Any suggestions as to good cards to use?

I've been looking at some of the $200+ 'gaming' cards, and wondered if they help with Daz renders?

For example, I rendered this:
http://lmoroney.deviantart.com/#/d5n4sez

...in about 2 hours on my machine. I was wondering if there's a way to speed that up, other than buying a new machine...

Szark

Nope becasue Daz Studio doesn't use the Graphics Card to render...It is done by the CPU but a good graphics card will help when using Daz Studio just not at render time.

2 hours...nice and fast if you ask me. :)

frank0314

Like szark says, DAZ Studio doesn't use the graphics card for rendering. It uses the CPU. A big graphics card will allow you to view the viewport better and create bigger scenes if it has on-board RAM. How much RAM do you have?

wancow

You could always look into octane: http://render.otoy.com/ it uses an NVidia card (and only NVidia)

But the truth is this: 3Delight is a fantastic render engine, and the more people who get to know it, the better it is for all of us :)

We're working on a knowledge base for the 3Delight Render Engine, and would love to have you participate :)

LocusSolus

It looks like rendering performances are mainly hardware (credit card) dependant.
The Luxmark page reports that render speed can vary from 1 to 500 according to the computer you use.

From: 135 Luxmark points (using a dual core 2 + 8600GT)
To: 70,127 Luxmark (up to 500 times faster) using a double Xeon E5520 and an insane SLI of 8 (eight) Nvidia 560GTI GPUs (*).

(*) And the personal advanced tuning skills of KyungSoo, a wellknown "extreme computing" geek, must be required as well ! :)

Here is the Luxmark results page, enjoy : http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMark_Results