CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor, GPU: NVIDEA GeForce RTX 3070, Operating system: Windows 10 pro, Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B450-PLUS REV X.0x, 40 GB RAM, Disk Drive: ST1000DM010-2EP102, Disk Drive: WDC WDS500G2BOA
I am wondering if buying an NVMe storage device with 3000mb/s read and write speeds would improve my workflow of rendering out animation image sequences from blender? The render is stopping everytime an image saves so I am wondering if a fast disk device would improve the overall render (and saving) time during this process?
Of course this also depends how much “disks” are connected to the same “channel” / lane… and if you save to SSD or HDD or cache with the SSD. ( So only using the SSD’s would speed this up already…)
So if you motherboard does not share the NVM with anything and you and also reaches this bandwith… just compare the numbers for yourself.
Going from HDD to SSD is night and day. I recently installed windows on an HDD in my old PC, and it was so unusable slow (after 8 years of using an SSD on that same machine) that I actually went and got a cheap SSD drive for it.
I’m not sure how much of a difference you’ll notice in Blender, but for general use, and operating tasks? It’s a huge improvement.
I have a HDD which I use for backing up older projects just in-case I ever need to revist them. I use the SSD for everything else which has roughly a 500 mb/s read and write speed. Looking online you can get NVMe’s with 3000 mb/s read and write speeds compatible with my motherboard but wanted to ask the question before buying one and finding that it didn’t make much difference.
Yes I am rendering to the SSD. I have an empty NVMe slot on the motherboard and just wondered if I would be better off using that for an image sequence drive only and then keep all other programs on the SSD or HDD (if not used frequently).
A few hundredMBs are not used for a single rendering image.
Most hardware doesn’t recognize this problem
The problem with rendering will not be the problem with file storage speed.
What is considered a bottleneck between rendering and storage is the Denoising process (for Cycles)
A task where the speed of a storage device is important is when you have to keep reading large amounts of information, such as video editing.
If a quick storage device is helpful in a blender, I think it is the case of using a high-resolution material image.
※ The speed of reading and writing on the storage device depends on the file type.
The fastest way to read and write a file will be a video file with a large capacity or a single compressed file with a large capacity.
A large number of image files in a small capacity are slow to read and write.
If the files are big, like if you have lots of passes and the resolution is high and if your frames are rendering extremely fast, I suppose it might be possible that the disk is the bottleneck. Still not very likely in my opinion. I would run more tests. Maybe try rendering to RAM disk see if that speeds up if you have enough RAM for this to be possible. But then it’s just writing speed - is that significant and does it matter that much? You will experience similar delays just copying your files as well. I don’t know. I use a fast NVMe SSD myself because I often composite large EXR files with lots of layers and I process them as animation so they are not loaded to memory, but are read from disk when I switch frames. I do experience a huge improvement with the fast disk for what I do, but that’s quite specific… My “frames” are sometimes more than 1GB.
If you are currently using at least a SSD SATA drive for OS, main apps and saving out the rendered files to, then NO, a NVMe drive will make ZERO difference to the render time.
If you are really noticing a total stop while Blender is actually saving the file, then two possible things come to mind. You are saving fairly large image files, with some sort of compression (especially lossless compression) and the pause is actually due to the CPU working on compressing the data.
Or, you are saving to a normal HDD and maybe it’s gone into sleep mode (depending on the time it takes each frame to render and the power saving settings), hence the drive has to wake up in order to save it.
Otherwise, unless it’s a couple of GB image file, any half good SATA SSD with a DRAM cache and/or write caching set within Windows, should save even a 100MB image file in the blink of an eye and Blender moves on to getting the next frame ready to render.
If that isn’t the case, then it’s more likely something else is going on and getting a NVMe drive won’t solve that.
I generally render animations in eevee out as EXR lossy files. I then composite these back together as video files. The resolution changes drastically depending on the application. Sometimes my content is for digital signage and other times for very large projection mapping content. I didn’t know you could render to the RAM disk so will look into this thanks. My individual frames are never usually more than a GB but my full image sequences usually end up being anywhere from less than 1 gb to tens of gb’s again depending on the application and the length of the animation required.
