X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Doug Park]

The iMacs actually are a pretty good value. Some of the earlier large screen iMacs have a higher than average failure rate, but Apple has been good about fixing them.

The iMac definitely has the eye candy appeal.

They do work well in a dual boot situation.

The video card is in general a pretty decent performer for Chief, but not top of the line and you don't get the option of upgrading it later.

If you want more flexibility then the Mac Pro is the way to go.

If you want a super ray trace performer the 12 core Mac Pro is a beast. But you will be into that for more than $4000. One thing that can save money is to buy your memory separate. After market memory for a Mac is less than half what Apple charges and just as good. The Mac Pro case is well designed so putting in memory is easy.

Think of an iMac as a closed system, like a laptop. While there are a few things you can do but getting inside the case is not something that you generally want to do.

While in theory any video card is compatible with a Mac Pro from a hardware standpoint the real issue is drivers. Apple sells some higher end cards for the Mac Pro but they are pricey.

[marty]

Hi Max

A high spec machine must have a SSD drive for the main operating system in my opinion. It doesent need to be massive as it just needs to run the os and programs along with current projects - data files and older projects can be on a standard drive.

I find the speed difference noticeable particularly with elevations and sections.

[MPDesign]

So I was curious how my machine I built would do on this raytrace test.
51 seconds here,

specs
I-7 64 bit machine build

Intel 2600k 3.4ghz cpu ( overclocked 4.6ghz)
Asus Sabertooth P67 MotherBoard
G.Skill Ram16gig
Nvidia geforce gtx 560 1 gig video card
300GB WesternDigital VelociRaptor 10,000rpm sta 6.0G/bs (main harddrive)
WD Caviar Black 2TB 7200rpm backup drive
Corsair H-60 liquid cooling

[Mr Oz]

Where can this test file be found?

I did a high quality raytrace of a fairly small sized restaurant containing maybe 20 lights last week and it took over 15 hours. I have an AMD quad core 3.7ghz machine with 8g ram and a 1g Radeon graphics card.

I thought this machine would be able to breeze raytracing but maybe its not as quick as I was expecting.

[Ian Pellant]

Mr Oz,

Browse through my earliest postings on this thread - the test plan file is attached as a zip.

Cheers.

[cbdllc]

Just built this:

Intel i7 3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz easily OC’d to 4.0 GHz on stock air cooler
32 GB CORSAIR DOMINATOR GT DDR3 1866 MHz (PC3 15000) CMT32GX3M4X1866C9
EVGA 680GTX 1084Mhz GPU, 2GB DDR5 (6208 MHz Memory Clock Speed)
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
Fractal Design Arc Silent Insulated Case
Storage: 240GB OCZ Agility III, (2) 10k Raptors RAID 0 (striped), 1TB WD SATA III, CD/DVD:none
Corsair HX850W PSU
(3) Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans
(1) Noctua NF-P14 FLX fan @ 750 rpm ultra low noise


58 sec. (@ 4.0 GHz)

Amazingly quiet. I have to put my ear to the case to hear it running.

[Ian Pellant]

cbdllc,

Great - at last the sub 60 second "barrier" is broken.

The i7 3770 series processors are nominally 10% faster at most calculations and produce only about 60% of the thermal heat load of the previous i7 2600 series. Faster and cooler.

My components are on order - they have about 2000 miles of road transport to endure... the waiting game begins.

The i7 3770K has the top performance Intel integrated graphics. I found a web benchmark that indicated the integrated graphics could easily outperform many top end add-in gaming cards. Apparently it has blazing DirectX acceleration... but no indication of how it handles OpenGL (needed for Chief).

I have ordered the standard i7 3770 since I'm adding a video card and not relying on the Intel integrated graphics... so I won't be able to test how good the i7 3777K is at every day Chief Architect 2D and 3D camera viewing.... is it possible for you to try the integrated graphics and report back? (Use the perspective camera and then try a "final render" with shadows turned on - that should give a graphics processing time test as opposed to ray tracing.)

Cheers.

[cbdllc]

...is it possible for you to try the integrated graphics and report back? (Use the perspective camera and then try a "final render" with shadows turned on - that should give a graphics processing time test as opposed to ray tracing.)

Cheers.[/QUOTE]

I can do that as it still sitting on top of my desk and I have to open it up again to add another drive. I'll render your test plan with the 680 GTX remove it and time the on-chip GPU.

I purchased the "K" version to play around with overclocking. So far all I have done is turned on the XMP memory profile which reads the RAM and then resets memory timings and speed automatically (went from 1333 to 1867) and used Gigabyte's new 3D BIOS and moved the CPU clockspeed slider up to 4.0 GHz and rebooted. Internal temps only went up about 1 degree in normal use. Raytracing, using the stock Intel air cooler, jumps the temps from 43C to 75C.

Jeff

[Ian Pellant]

Hi cdllc,

I haven't gone looking for the thermal specs on i7-3 series yet. It took a while to find the old Prescott specs.... which indicated a thermal throttling temp of 75C... which may still be the design temp at which the new processors cut themselves back. So, you may have oc'ed to it's design limit. Be careful of any long ray tracing jobs at the top end if the air cooling is maxed out.

Intels hype for the generation 3 i7 with HD 4000 integrated graphics sounds impressive. Only note I could find about OpenGL is that it supports OpenGL 2.1. ATI FireGL cards are supporting OpenGL 3 and above... so I suspect that there are some apps that will be beyond the Intel integrated graphics engine.

The ATI Radeon card in my old experimental box cooked itself a few weeks ago so I had to fall back to a very old Radeon 9250. I then found that Chief X4 will not color texture render in perspective camera views. The old card can only manage OpenGL 1.4. And that's where OpenGL caps in my HP netbook. Neither of them will color render in Chief X4; there is no problem in Chief X2.

The issue here is if business (not home office) level computers hit the market with i7 HD 4000 graphics, whether they would be a good base for Chief without adding a separate graphics card. At present the "gaming" computers are becoming way over the top in bit blit graphics, sound and price to be a cost effective business choice for a production office running Chief. (We found a new ASUS Business line of computers using i7's that are a third the price of the gaming boxes sold in this little part of the world.)

The graphics card should not affect raytracing (I would have thought)... but Intel seem to have sneeked in a floating point accelerator between their CPU and GPU in the i7 Gen 3 that may have some benefit (I dunno)

Thanks to all that have overclocked a Gen 2 i7 to around 4 GHz and achieved sub 60 second ray tracings. It seems that the "magic" number is around 4GHz for the Intel i7's.

AMD seem to be a long way behind... which I must confess is a disappointment. In 2007 AMD Athlons trounced Intel... Intel has bounced back to the top. (this Quarter).

Cheers.