X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ben Palmer]

Holy Cow George, your hardrives cost more than my whole computer...I'm sure it's fast though...very nice.

[Ian Pellant]

Thanks Tommy,

That's what I was looking for.

Setting the ambient light levels in CA X4 ray tracer is very different to the older versions of Chief that used the POV Ray engine. Ambient of around 50% worked with the old software, the current needs to be boosted up more... however an export to POV drops all the settings and the image is much brighter.

And why use POV Ray? .... the answer is twofold when needing to do a lot of ray tracing:
1. POV Ray can be run on a computer that does not have Chief Architect installed - so the task can be done on any other office computers and run overnight. Offload the work to non-production computers.
2. POV Ray supports batch processing. If you have many ray traces to do, you export them all from Chief then set them up on another computer to run as sequential jobs in a batch queue. Doing this you can set up a lot of ray traces to be done after hours.

If you don't export to POV Ray and have to run the CA built-in ray tracer, then you have to hang around for each one to be finished.... has anyone tried opening several (say 4) different plans in Chief at the same time and tried to ray trace each one at the same time??

If we are stuck with manually starting each plan to ray trace and waiting for it to finish, then doing each in the shortest time is very important (how many and how long are one's coffee breaks?).

I'm confronted with a sales manager who wants all the house designs to have more decorative images for the brochures... there's about 94 existing designs and we need to add about 20 new ones. Modeling each in Chief is the first step (only need to be facade models - that's why the test plan was tossed together just to get a frontal view) then each would need ray tracing. Do the math and that will well and truly tie up a computer (and me) for months. Elapsed time for ray tracing is a very big business concern.

Just experimenting with the ray tracing settings to get the desired results is very time consuming if it takes 20 minutes to get a low res job such as in the test plan. For A4 (US Letter) size brochures the horizontal resolution needs to be about 800 pixels with anti-aliasing turned on the smooth the edges. If I can keep that down to under 2 minutes, then I have a chance of doing the work.

I am trying to determine if the latest AMD FX 8 core processors will ray trace quicker than the Intels. It has been easy to configure hardware (using a Shuttle bare bones) to use an i-7 2600, but the AMD has proven to be a monster... very little support for it in Australia... but still possible.

Cheers.

[redwood]

Was your test plan somewhat similar to those that you will need to ray trace in real life?

If so, you really shouldn't have a problem in getting them done in around a minute. My machine is a stock Dell off the shelf and it did it in 68 sec. Certainly there are a lot of faster units out there.

[Ian Pellant]

Thanks Mark,

An i7 2600 is the Intel web selector recommendation for CAD / Modeling.

RAM over 4GB is possibly superfluous... but it's so cheap that adding more is irrerestable. Some systems will enable dual channel switching if pairs of slots are filled. That may or may not improve ray tracing... dunno. It also means that 4GB x 2 is possibly a faster option than 8GB x 1 for DIMM configuration.

The test plan is a bottom end example... in practice, more detail, some light sources and more landscaping will be used and at higher resolution and probably with more advanced ray tracing options. If the plans are built up for brochure presentations there will be full internal detailing - that may blow the processing time up if internal details will be seen through windows (using window blinds is a way to limit that... maybe).

Thanks for reminding me of Dell.... I haven't explored their web site for a solution, yet.

Still trying to configure an AMD FX 8xx solution for price comparison. Ther are a lot of older AMD motherboards that were built for Athlons and Phenoms, and with a BIOS upgrade can support the FX... yeah, right. The Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional motherboard seems to be the best choice for a roaring AMD FX 8 core system. Keeping motherboard manufacturers up to date is one reason AMD and Intel change the CPU "slot" every couple of years.

Cheers.

[jpremodeler]

52 seconds raytrace time. I am already searching my next processor. I handle 3 new projects a week, each with anywhere from 18-40 raytrace images per project. anything i can do to speed up the process, I will.

[hanconone]

I have just completed build on long awaited EVGA SR-X build. Ran benchmark test: total time 0:00:24. Not sure I can rationalize the cost but it is very fast...

W7 Prof 64 bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 processors
48GB Corsair Vengeance 1333
2 EVGA GTX 690 SC graphics cards SLI