- Aug 28, 2010
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I know a little about hardware for playing games. I know very little about rendering in programs like Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya.
The son of a friend of mine studies to become an architect. He is using 3DS Max to renderer nice pictures of the buildings he has designed. Weirdly enough, not many students do this. And the university staff consists of old-school people who grew up with pencils and paper. Regarding 3D rendering he is on his own.
He has a laptop with a i7-2670QM cpu (@2.2GHz), 8GB ram and an AMD FirePro M5950 vdieocard. The problem is that the M5950 card is from the last generation of cards before the GCN cards.
He is using the VRay plugin to render his pictures. A render with 300k polygons takes ~8 hours. VRay supports hardware rendering via OpenCL. But it requires a CUDA card or a GCN card. As his FirePro M5950 does not have GCN, his rendering is completely done on the CPU. (Surprisingly, his i7-2670QM at 2.2GHz seems to be not much slower than my non-hyperthreading i5-3570K at 4.0GHz. He's maybe 20-30% slower only).
He wants to speed up his rendering.
Buying a new desktop-PC is not viable. Cost is a factor (he's just a student). And in 6 months he will go abroad for his studies for a year. Buying a new PC now for just 6 months is a waste of money.
So the question is:
What render-plugin for 3DS Max should he use, that can do hardware-acceleration on his non-GCN videocard ?
I looked at a few render-plugins.
VRay only supports GCN (and Cuda).
iRay and Mental Ray are written by nVidia, so I suppose they only run on CUDA (or the CPU). (Correct ?)
Then there is a render-plugin called "QuickSilver hardware renderer". This one only uses DirectX and not CUDA or GCN. Only DirectX and SM3.0 required. I suppose he could try this renderer.
Are there any other alternatives that are worth checking out ?
There seems very little documentation on the net about these things to get started. And I have found no active forums about 3D-rendering that could answer questions. Any suggestions ?
Thanks in advance.
The son of a friend of mine studies to become an architect. He is using 3DS Max to renderer nice pictures of the buildings he has designed. Weirdly enough, not many students do this. And the university staff consists of old-school people who grew up with pencils and paper. Regarding 3D rendering he is on his own.
He has a laptop with a i7-2670QM cpu (@2.2GHz), 8GB ram and an AMD FirePro M5950 vdieocard. The problem is that the M5950 card is from the last generation of cards before the GCN cards.
He is using the VRay plugin to render his pictures. A render with 300k polygons takes ~8 hours. VRay supports hardware rendering via OpenCL. But it requires a CUDA card or a GCN card. As his FirePro M5950 does not have GCN, his rendering is completely done on the CPU. (Surprisingly, his i7-2670QM at 2.2GHz seems to be not much slower than my non-hyperthreading i5-3570K at 4.0GHz. He's maybe 20-30% slower only).
He wants to speed up his rendering.
Buying a new desktop-PC is not viable. Cost is a factor (he's just a student). And in 6 months he will go abroad for his studies for a year. Buying a new PC now for just 6 months is a waste of money.
So the question is:
What render-plugin for 3DS Max should he use, that can do hardware-acceleration on his non-GCN videocard ?
I looked at a few render-plugins.
VRay only supports GCN (and Cuda).
iRay and Mental Ray are written by nVidia, so I suppose they only run on CUDA (or the CPU). (Correct ?)
Then there is a render-plugin called "QuickSilver hardware renderer". This one only uses DirectX and not CUDA or GCN. Only DirectX and SM3.0 required. I suppose he could try this renderer.
Are there any other alternatives that are worth checking out ?
There seems very little documentation on the net about these things to get started. And I have found no active forums about 3D-rendering that could answer questions. Any suggestions ?
Thanks in advance.