I wanted to ask a question about this but wasn’t exactly sure where to post it. Anyhow, my question is basically about the compatibility with blenders rendering engine in addition to PC hardware thats used to accelerate it.
I rendered an animation before with blender that was 150 frames long with a lot of mapping and motion blur. But it was only 3D letters and took me over 15 hours to render. I have a 2.0 GHZ processor and an AVI motherboard thats been discontinued in one of the only internet PC venues that still caries it. Its a DDR 333.
Has AGP slots which is what I need for my Radeon X850 pro. Oh, the processor is an Intel Celeron ® with 2000 Mhz.
But what I want to know is, does blender render stuff this slow with any kind of hardware? Or does it depend on the PC? If I were to upgrade my PC hardware to a better motherboard and processor would it speed up blenders performance? I mean I don’t want to blow the $$$ on it if it’s not gonna render things faster. So I’m wondering, is this a blender problem or a hardware problem?
Everything depends on hardware buddy. Any software that runs on better hardware will run better then on crappy hardware.
If you want to speed it up alot I think blender mostly depends on CPU and ram. Especially the ram!
Now you could compile blender yourself to speed it up as it would be custom built directly for your hardware, but I don’t think it makes alot of difference. And don’t be prepared to do this without reseach and alot of work, or so I hear.
Also, you’ll want to make sure that if you upgrade your comp, you get the right stuff.
For example, on my system the bottleneck (the main part that slows down rendering times the most) is my fsb. I have very slow ram, and therefore, blender/my processor will dump data onto my chips slowly.
But almost 99.9999% of the time, upgrading your processor speed or the amount of processors on your system will increase rendering times. Of course, if your bottleneck is obsessively small, (though unlikely) you’ll still get slow rendering times.
Yep, that’s the damn truth :} So many people don’t seem to understand this. The rendering process is nothing other than a lot of data in your scene being processed. Thus, cpu and ram. A motherbaord may play a small role, so get a good one. Graphics card will have absolutely no effect on rendering time.
Oh, the processor is an Intel Celeron (R) with 2000 Mhz
Ah. Celerons are incredibly slow. I know, I have one in another computer. You’ll notice a huge difference if you upgrade to a newish processor.
GHz isn’t the most important thing. I am running an AMD64 3000 at 1.8 and it’s about 5 times quicker (if memory serves me correctly) than my 2GHz celeron.
Those shiny new core 2 duo’s are nice and speedy too, especially for the price.
As said, get a good processor for quick rendering, as well as some decent ram. No need to go overboard, if you have some money still look at 6 month old stuff. It’s worth not getting state of the art components because they cost more for a little bit more performance (twice the money for 20% increase type of thing)