Optimal Memory to run Carrara 8.5 Pro?
TimBo
Posts: 151
I know the system requirements show something like 2 to 3 gig plus for running Carrara. But what is the optimal amount of memory that the Pro version could use? I currently have 8 gig memory installed and I think 128 meg is allocated for video use. I have another 8 gig memory module on order. Will the 16 gig total memory add anything to the performance of rendering speed? When I render a scene I see two boxes. The #1 box is usually always faster than the #2 box. Sometimes the #1 box can be almost a whole row ahead of #2 box.
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Hi Tim :)
I'd cancel the the 8 gig add on,. it won't help as much as you imagine,. .
Carrara will use as much, or as little of your system ram as is needed to,load and render the scene,.
The two boxes,. mean that you have a dual core,... not sure why one is slower than the other, apart from the section that's being rendered by one core has more detail than the areas rendered by the other core,. that happens on all systems, (empty areas render faster than detailed areas)
you can lower the size of the "buckets" or areas which each core renders,. see the bottom of the render settings panel.
that can speed up the render, but can also slow it own slightly,. it's a matter of adjusring for your scene and your system
It also sounds like you have a Graphics chip which is part of your motherboard,.
Is your system a Laptop ?
Some system spec's would help,, but if you're using a Laptop, then your options are limited.
Getting a Quad core or Higher,.will help, ....since there's more processors..
It is not a laptop. It is an HP tower desktop computer. It is a system which very little can be done to upgrade it. When the new memory arrives early next week I will look the insides over to see what can be upgraded.
Operating System
Windows 8 64-bit
CPU
Intel Pentium G2020T @ 2.50GHz 93 °F
Ivy Bridge 22nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
Hewlett-Packard 2AFB (SOCKET 0) 83 °F
Graphics
X325BV-FMQR (1920x1080@59Hz)
Intel HD Graphics (HP)
Storage
931GB TOSHIBA DT01ACA100 (SATA) 90 °F
465GB TOSHIBA External USB 3.0 USB Device (USB (SATA)) 90 °F
Optical Drives
hp CDDVDW SH-216BB
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio
Good,. it's a desktop,. that mean you can rip everythign out and replace it easilly,. that's what its designed to allow the user to do,.
Admittedly HP and other Box makers,. cover every screw with warning labels to deter the curious.
but PC's are made to allow any main component to be replaced,. whether that's the Motherboard, Processors, the power supply, the graphics card, or adding a cooling syetem.
Many Computer retailers,. sell motherboad/processor/ram bundles,. so you can replace the guts of your system. or buy individual parts, and replace them as needed
most things simply clip into place on the motherboard, and are held with a screw.
I think all motherboards now come with an on board graphics chipset,. but that can be bypassed if you add a new graphics card.
ALSO ... you should have a User guide, which will tell you the maximum speed of ram you can get for that motherboard,. make sure you're upgrading to make it faster,. and not just matching the current ram chip,. which would normally not be the fastest,.
According to the spec for that processor,. it can take DDR3 1333 mhz,. which will run faster than the current 665
you should also look at what processors will fit onto that motherboard,. you may be able to get an AMD Quad core.
Hmmm... Not sure why the one would be faster than the other. As Andy said, if one bucket is on a complicated area to render, say an area with a lot of transparencies, alphas, refraction, reflections, etc. that would possibly slow one of the buckets.
I had another theory my non-tech-guy brain thought about as a possibility for one processor/core going slower. Could there be other processes on your computer using the second processor instead of spreading the load equally across both, thus leaving less computing cycles for Carrara's renderer?
The extra RAM could help your speed a little as you could hold more of your scene in RAM, which could mean less swapping to a scratch disk, but a real speed boost would come from a faster processor(s). The extra RAM will have the benefit of allowing you to build much more complex scenes.
If you are planning to upgrade to windows 10 then the extra ram will definately help.
Last night when I was working on my western scene with 3 gen 2 characters and thier closes and the table from th old town saloon I was upto using 8 Gb of ram but when i looked in task manager Carrara was only using 1.5-2 Gb of Ram and the rest was Windows using 6 Gb for some reason.
On my out door scene it hit 100 percent utilization for a while. .
I did not have this using win 8.1
May have to get anouther 16 Gb of RAM.
I am running Carrara with 16 GB of RAM, few scenes ever need more than 8GB, but it is a cheap upgrade to avoid crashes or slowdowns. Not any faster though.
I would also upgrade the dual core to a quad core, depending on what the HP mobo allows (check the manual or call HP). Now that Skylake is out, 2 generations older Ivy Bridge CPUs should be possible to find at a decent price.
Right now. set the "tile size" to 32 in the Rendering/Misc list.
As a bonus, if you use OctaneRender or LuxusCore rendering plugins for Carrara, a separate GPU is a nice upgrade, but if you are not in a rush, the next gen NVIDIA and AMD coming in the middle of 2016 will push the prices down of the current mid and high end GPUs.
EDIT: Uncheck the "Spool textures on disk" option in File/Prefs/Imaging... menu.
Would a Ram Drive help in any way?
No, just loads the scene faster and the RAM is more useful for Carrara and any apps, rather than using a RAM Drive as a swap file.
All my scenes and textures are stored on an external USB 3.0 solid state drive. In fact all my data is on a solid state drive. All the programs are installed on the internal SATA drive.
The issue is processor speed and ram speed rather than hard drive data rates,. I have a Hybrid SATA SSD HD, plus an internal SSD and a 2TB internal Sata drive, on a dual OS system, but none of that makes anything rendr faster,. it's processor and ram ,. unless as 3D rendero points out,. you look at off-loading that procesing to a GPU graphics card / and different render engine.
Carrara's renderer doesn;t use the graphics GPU for processing but there are altetrnative renderer plugins available.
If you have room internally,. Use the Internal drive for your content,. The data transfer rate for SATA is aroujnd 6GB per second.
the rate for USB 3 is around 3 seconds per 1 GB,.. which is much slower than your internal drive.
It could be possible that your dual core processors can't process data that fast ,. so any speed gains you have with the external SSD, could be offset by the bottle-neck of data waiting to be processed
As a test,. you could use dim to install some content on your internal, and see how that works for you.,. but it won't increase the speed of rendering,. that's down to processing.
Unless you have a USB 3 port on your PC, the USB 3 drive will only run at USB 2 speeds (which are very slow - around 10%). That's fine for archive, but it will mave loading and saving very very slow. You can get USB 3 cards to plug in for not much money, and that would give a noticeable improvement of load and save times. USB 3 runs at up to 5GB/second, which in practical terms is faster than you can pull the data off most spindle hard drives, so you won't notice it being slower than the internal. I have around 6TB attached by USB3.
I recently upgraded my iMac from 8GB to 24, and while not significantly faster, Carrara does seem to be a lot more stable. Daz Studio however does seem to render significantly faster with the extra memory.
As someone else said, reduce the bucket size if one core seems to get away from the other. Your target is to have every core reach the end of the scene at more or less the same time. Otherwise, for the time between the two cores finishing, you will effectively be doing a single core render, which will be slower. I find a setting of 32 pixels seems to work best. It'll depend to some extent on the scene.
Something else,. I was thinking that if you can reduce the amount of processes running on your system which you don'l need, you could free up some more processing,.
I didn't buy into Windows 8 because it seems to be oriented towards touch-screen,. and that would make it more Graphical,.. and animated graphics mean processing.
I know that Windows 7 had a load of BS added to make it fancy and appealing, such as"Aero" and other animated nonsense,.., but all of that comes at the cost of your system resources,. By eliminating those unnecessary processes,. and any start up programs you don't "Really" need,. you could free some processing fot he applications which do need it
.. but realistically,.. you're not going to see a huge difference.
hope it helps
I had 8 GB of RAM when I got my desktop, adding another 8 to make 16 enabled me to load much bigger scenes but it still rendered the same speed.
So it does help, just not with speed.
Thanks. I feel better about having ordered the extra RAM. It should arrive in a few days according to the tracking. Someone mentioned the gains in rendering speed in Daz. That is the main reason I do not use Daz is because even a selection test render takes forever compared to Carrara's selection test render. As I look over all the responses in this topic I can see where I can do things to improve some things in my Carrara experiences.
Yes it does help in DS, I found that when I doubled it.