VRAY performance on Dual G5 2.0 Mac....

[courtneyrocks]

Hi there,
I am debating whether to get VRAY for C4D now or wait till I upgrade my MAC next year.

Of late I have been annoyed with Advanced Renders performance on my machine. Would VRAY render any faster on my old G5 dual 2Ghz(with 3.5 GB RAM)? or is the difference negligable?

Is anyone here that could tell me how VRAY runs on a similair machine?

Any comments, opinions would be appreciated.

[Tong]

faster then AR sure.

[collywobbles]

i have pretty much the same machine as courtneyrocks. I work as part of an architectural design team where the designs evolve and cinema4d is used as a progressive design tool, and eventually used for final presentation. My problem is that when it comes to final presentation (A3 @300dpi for example) my render times can run into 20hrs+ Am i doing something completely wrong with my settings or is the simple truth that my machine just does not have the processing power needed. Even test renders eat into my day.
i don't know how i could convince my boss to fork out for a 8ghz processor.

[Tong]

problem not with PC, problem with settings, i can make so high settings, that render will be ended in next month ;-)

[collywobbles]

do you know then of a 'rule of thumb' then for such renders. most are exterior renders with a physical sun and a few interior area lights at low intensity and no shadows.
My polygon count however on my current project is 1854149, do you think this is an issue?

[courtneyrocks]

Hi Tong,
do you use a machine of similar spec or is your statement "Faster then AR sure" more of a general statement about the speed of VRAY?

Collywobbles experience is kind of what I would expect to happen if I used VRAY on my G5. Beautiful renders, but with very large render times. Large rendertimes can be very inconvenient in a commercial environment with tight deadlines. They can also make the learning process more difficult.

I do need to upgrade my machine but this won't happen for another few months. Is it worth getting VRAY in the meantime to get up to speed?

Also, is anyone here using VRAY on a macbook or macbook Pro? What is the speed like?

[Tong]

I tested Vray and AR (similiar settings, not sure is it correct), but i tried.

so vray was more quality and speedy (40% average), when i used AO like shader vray was slower, but i not sure they i did it correctly. :(

i used amd sempron 2800+ with 2 gb mem (home computer ;-) ).

[collywobbles]

tested out a scene file on a new G5 Mac Pro (2x3Ghz 4gb ram) recently aquired for the office, took 9 minutes, same scene on my G5 power Pc........90 minutes!!!! Mine's in the pipeline.........hopefully!

[courtneyrocks]

Wow collywobbles! That is a massive difference.

I guess that shows that no matter how you tweak the settings, the dual G5s are getting old. I wish I was upgrading now. Thanks for the comparison.

Cheers

[Vitos]

My DP 2Ghz G5 with 4Gb of RAM, is faster tens times on some scenes, but simple, single-family houses render just about the same time as AR. But maby it's bacause, I use quite datailed, textured object shingles instead of plain polygon roof.