I'm a novie at rendering, any suggestions for best settings
for both quality and speed? Just installed a 1 gig nvidia card and
can't notice speed inprovement over old 256 meg card.
My boss is becoming restless
That's because your video card really has no effect on
PhotoWorks speed. PhotoWorks is hungry for two things. Processing
power and RAM (in that order). The more of each you have the faster
your render will process.
Most rendering applications support multithreading and are really
all about how fast your processor can crunch the information. The
faster the clock speed the more processors or cores you have the
faster the rendering application can work. The Luxology engine in
PV360 may be more efficent (not sure this is true) than the Mental
Ray engine in PW so it may be able to process info faster than PW?
Of course this is dependant on a number of factors. Anna's bench
mark is a good test for this.
The ability for the occassional or novice user to produce good
results faster with PV360 is more a result of the software
(interface, set up, flow, etc) than the speed of the rendering
engine I think. Not to say one software is better than the other
but I could probably also say a good PW user can achieve as good
results in about the same amount of time as a PV360 user.
Hopefully Rob will confirm or correct that 360 doesn't need as much processing power, but can still produce great results.
Most rendering applications support multithreading and are really all about how fast your processor can crunch the information. The faster the clock speed the more processors or cores you have the faster the rendering application can work. The Luxology engine in PV360 may be more efficent (not sure this is true) than the Mental Ray engine in PW so it may be able to process info faster than PW? Of course this is dependant on a number of factors. Anna's bench mark is a good test for this.
The ability for the occassional or novice user to produce good results faster with PV360 is more a result of the software (interface, set up, flow, etc) than the speed of the rendering engine I think. Not to say one software is better than the other but I could probably also say a good PW user can achieve as good results in about the same amount of time as a PV360 user.
As Rob says the more cores, more Ghz and more RAM will make your rendering go faster. The GPU is not your issue.
What are your system spec's? Go to www.solidmuse.com, I have some benchmark test files you can use to see how your system stacks up.
Cheers,