Computer speed question

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cholme@me.com
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Computer speed question

Post by cholme@me.com » Thu Mar 22, 2012 4:43 am

I currently have a MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz dual core with 4GB Ram and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB graphics card.

I was considering upgrading to the new MacBook Pro but I was wondering if I would see a marked difference in my render time. The new computers are 2.4 GHz quad core with 8GB RAM and AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 1GB GDDR5.

Any ideas as to what I might expect?

As an example, the attached render was done in 9 hrs.

Thanks for the input.

Chris
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tar_gniK
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Re: Computer speed question

Post by tar_gniK » Thu Mar 22, 2012 5:27 am

I would say your decrease in render time would be around 15-20%.

I am not familiar with Macs, but fishing at the prices at the Apple Store -- £1849 for a quad-core Intel i7, Radeon 6770M -- that is ludicrous.

In comparison, you can assemble a monster PC centered around a six-core 3930K for less money, and incredible performance possibly up to 40-50% decrease in render time from what you are on now.

However, if portability is the number one factor, then that is a different matter.

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Headroom
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Computer speed question

Post by Headroom » Thu Mar 22, 2012 1:03 pm

When I upgraded from a core2 duo iMac to a i7 quad core iMac the speed almost doubled.

I love my iMac but for rendering they are not the best. If its got to be a mobile Mac then I'd almost suggest to keep the current MacBook and get PC/Windows system as a pure render slave. That will be my next upgrade and will definitely a better bang for the buck. The iMac and Mac books only use the mobile versions of current Nvidia and ATI graphics cards and compared with the normal PC versions their render performance (Cuda and OpenCL supporter path tracing) is pretty wimpy.

If you've got an apple store nearby, perhaps you can ask them to install a trial version of indigo and you can simply compare the render times of the test scenes.
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lycium
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Re: Computer speed question

Post by lycium » Fri Mar 23, 2012 12:04 am

I would expect something more like Headroom's speed increase, from such a large upgrade.

9 hrs is very long for that render, what rendering mode did you use? It looks like single-directional PT, without MLT, would be best here.

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Polinalkrimizei
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Re: Computer speed question

Post by Polinalkrimizei » Fri Mar 23, 2012 8:16 am

Probably not very comparable, but the upgrade from my old 2-core 2Ghz to an i72600k + a decent graphics card was at least like an increase by factor 10 and more...

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