X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ian Pellant]

Thanks Doug,

I managed to tie the computer up with an 8 1/2 hour ray trace that was not especially exciting... buzzed away for several hours photon shooting before any view draw occured. Blatantly obvious that the old P4 is useless for production ray tracing... It's chewing away again on another trace at this moment. The "art" in ray tracing is finding the settings that give a good result without putting the processing time through the roof

Still don't have a good clue as to whether an AMD FX 8 core will be quicker than an Intel i7 Quad core. "Common sense" would say: "8 cores are faster than 4". After hours of finding a motherboard and RAM configuration to suit an FX-8150 the system costs are about $10 different between an AMD or Intel configuration - custom builds. Can't find any built systems using the AMD FX-8xxx processor (in Australia most systems off the shelf are "small office" or "home entertainment", then jump to over the top "gamers".).

I will experiment with 4 copies of the test plan and ray trace with the simple configuration (which after a system BIOS tweak I got down to 17:47 (whoopee)). That may strain the old box... which uses a Prescott P4 - one of the last of the "hot" ones running at 3.6GHz - CPU fan buzzing away in overdrive.

Cheers.

[lbuttery]

then jump to over the top "gamers"

Ian:

CA's has recommended gaming PC's for Chief

how much "top" depends on your budget

Lew

[Ian Pellant]

Hi Lew,

Nope... the gamer machines focus on:
Very fast hard / SSD drives
Crossfire or similar multiple gaming video cards

Both of which add considerable cost and are of little benefit to CAD apps and especially not ray tracing. Double the system cost for no performance gains... not a good move.

The disk drive and video card do nothing while ray tracing is running. Ray tracing is mostly CPU intensive.

That said: the motherboard and RAM I'm looking at is top level gamer stuff- but the video card will be FirePro (CAD certified, OpenGL accelerated, not so much DirectX) and the hard drive will be a modest WD Black Caviar, not a Velociraptor. My system configurations are pricing at Aus $1400... gamers seem happy to spend twice that.

But if one has to buy a ready made box, then an average gamer box is better than the average office box. I've been building PCs since the mid 80's so I tend to focus on application specifics.

Cheers.

[lbuttery]

Ian:

Chief is not CAD based

it is based on OpenGL

which is why CA recommends gamer PC's/video cards

however, if you are using other CAD apps then you may
have other requirements to consider

Lew

[Ian Pellant]

Hi Lew,

CAD generically is: Computer Aided Design... it is NOT AutoCAD!

AutoCAD is Computer Aided Drafting.

One could call Chief Architect CAAD - Computer Aided Architectural Drafting.

Revit can be called CAAD and it is totally OpenGL based... as are many advanced "CAD" apps.

I use Revit a lot and it has always been a pain to enter an architects office and find they have gaming type computers... sold by the local "IT guru". Very mediocre.

AutoCAD tends to use DirectX. It's a clunker... and always was... I used to work for Intergraph (spawners of MicroStation) and we all considered AutoCAD to be a toy... I still refuse to have a frontal lobotomy in order to use AutoCAD.

Revit and Chief Architect use OpenGL... which most gaming video cards are NOT especially designed for.

I've used ATI cards since 1988 (VGA Wonder).... Rage was good. Radeon has been a mixed agony and I will never buy another one. The Radeon team seem to aim totally at the gaming market and after 2 years, dump the previous cards into the Legacy bucket. Support drops off rapidly.

ATI FireGL, now called FirePro is a different story because the cards are designed for modeling design professionals and support is maintained almost indefinately.

Take the time to explore the AMD/ATI web site and discover what FirePro is about and the heavy weight design modeling systerms that it is certified for. (The heavy weight solids modeling softwares used for designing motor vehicles, aircraft, ships, space stations, etc.)

Sorry for getting a bit steamed but the number of arguments I have had with computer store guys trying to tell me I don't need certified OpenGL hardware acceleration when all I need is DirectX, are beyond count.

Gaming cards are optimised for bitblitting - filling the screen with images as quickly as possible. CAD requires vector drawing to the screen... One possible reason Chief Architect uses OpenGL is that DirectX support for vector line and text dropped off after DX-7. I was programming with the stuff way back then, when bitblitting took over in DX-8. (I think it was about Chief version 7 when they dropped DirectX and went OpenGL?)

Cheers.

[lbuttery]

Ian:

CA has stated many times that Chief derives no perceivable benefit from the Nvidia Quadro cards which are CAD based
especially in relation to the extra $$$

they recommend mid to high-end gaming cards

CA has never mentioned DirectX - it appears to have no relation with Chief

you may want to discuss directly with CA's sales team

Lew

[Ian Pellant]

Lew,

The topic of this thread is CPU choice for Ray Tracing.

Choices mostly being between AMD FX-8150 or Intel i7 2600 processors.

My need is to ray trace a lot of models in the shortest time possible.

The video card has nothing to do with ray tracing.

Chief Architect X4 uses OpenGL. Revit uses OpenGL.

AutoCAD used DirectX.

Much earlier versions of Chief used DirectX. Then ART moved it all to OpenGL.

Professional 3D modeling softwares generally use OpenGL. Not DirectX.

There are almost no off-the-shelf PC's to be bought that are optimised for OpenGL.

Microsoft pushed DirectX for it's X-Box which was aimed at home entertainment and gaming. Most Windows based games use DirectX. Most gaming PC's are optimised for DirectX.

At the consumer level, if the choice is between an "office / business workstation" with Intel Integrated Graphics or a "Gaming" computer with accelerated graphics then the gaming computer is the better choice.

Have you ever seen a computer on sale that is labelled: "Optimized for Chief Architect" ?

It is a sales dilema outside the context of this thread.

Cheers.