Will Nvidia Quadro speed up mental ray?
 

Hi,

I am thinking of buying an Nvidia Quadro 5800 card (or later model if released). So I was wondering, will this card speed up my mental ray renderings? Is it worth the extra $$$? I have a dual quad core Xeon machine and was wondering how much more increase would I get. Please note, I want *mental ray* hardware accelaration not the Maya renderer.

Thanks!

-N.

At this point I don't think mental ray uses the GPU for rendering (someone correct me if this has changed) so getting a different card won't change your render times at all.

I also dont think these will have any or very little effect on your render time with mental ray. There will be much better performance in the viewport and maya will not slug if you are working with heavy polycounts. I think the main enhancement is if you are rendering with gelato which I believe is a nvdia render. If you use gelato for rendering then you will experience much faster render times but you will then have to learn how to render with gelato.

some stuff here about it.
Hope it helps

http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1212045140642.html

That sucks. So if I buy a new computer with the latest Xeons (dual) how much faster will mental ray be compared with what I have now (dual penryn Xeon X5482)? I just want to see if the upgrade is worth it.

Thanks,

-Nektarios

I don't know how much faster they will be... if an upgrade won't change the number of cores, and the clockspeeds are about the same, I'd say not much.
Is it worth it? The real question is, how big is your wallet, and how precious is your time? Only you can answer that. :)

My budget is about $8000 (maybe $9000). I don't want to wait four months to render a super high quality five min animation. I'd like to cut this to two weeks if possible. How can I do this?

Thanks,

-N.

Couple options spring to mind... there are commercial render farms that you can upload your animation to, and they will render it quickly at a price.
Or you could try to set up your own render farm... $8000 could go a long way in building, say 8 barebones rendering machines that you could network together and distribute the rendering via backburner. Is this a one-time deal, or will you be doing a ton of rendering over the next few years?

I'll be doing a tone of rendering over the next few years. I can't seem to wait for each frame to render in about an hour. I'm too impatient... :-)

you could just try optimising your scene... i guess that would be the cheapest option. (if you haven't done this already)

Now this looks fast!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ianMNs12ITc

I like the window with the 32 cores on display... :-)

8000 dollars can get you a pretty good assembled hard ware what you want is to have one modelling pc and a rendering pc. It already seems you have a modelling machine so i would suggest getting a pc with the new core i7 processors they are about 999 usd .And processing power is what you want for mental ray

Yeah processing power is what you need not graphics.

For the money I would probably opt for about 3-4 less powerful machines and then create a render farm from them to speed up the rendering, keeping your main machine for modelling and test renders

No you need good processor power (quads) and feck loads of RAM!

But also you are better off buying Renderman and extra ram for the money of a new machine - RMan wont give you any bullshit. Mental Ray calculates every model into tris before it even squeaks, even then it dies of prematurely ejaculated calculation time and throws you up an error, saying 'oops sorry got any tissues' wheres as RMan doesnt get bogged down with that type of thing.

Cheers
Jay

Worked on a job in London recently and the other dude there was saying about how much better renderman is. I think he was saying something about you having to model in quads as it does not like tris though. It is really the standard to model everything as quads but guess this might cause problems for some.

Will have to give the trial a go at some point.