Hello all,
My office is looking to purchase a computer dedicated for rendering in house using Rhino and Vray in windows. To avoid raising thre how long is a piece of string question, we would like a solid machine, somewhere in the middle ground.
Was hoping to get some advice for what this means for the hardware, best type of CPU, GPU and ram requirements.
Any advice greatly appreciated.
will you focus on CPU or GPU rendering? I think the latter is a better bet for now (giving more choice for other render engines as well) What kind of work do you do?
The new 30 series cards from Nvidia seem to be very promising in terms of price/performance. For Rhino look for best single core performance. Ram: depends on what else you want to do at the same time as running Rhino, how many instances of Rhino you want to have open, how large are the files you work with, both in size as wel as in amount of objects in your Rhino scene.
Hi Gijs,
Thanks for your response. I had asssumed GPU rendereing was the way to go. It will be for architectural renderings both external and interiors. However not to extreme photrealistic quality. Will be similtaneously running other CAD programs, mainly Autocad and post production editing like Photoshop.
To give you an idea of what I am currently managing with, working with files up to around 1GB sometimes (although slowly):
Intel Core i7-6700 CPU @ 3.4GHz
8GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce GT730 2GB dedicated VRAM
Thanks
I’d argue the i7 is still good enough for modeling, just increase your ram (16 will already be a big difference in your case, but if possible put in 32 or more) and an 8GB or more graphics card and fast SSD. I’m sure right now your memory is the first bottleneck and for your Rhino viewport also the 2GB graphics card will be for a large part responsible for the sluggish experience. For rendering, be aware that if you are making renderings with your graphics card, it will slow down the whole system in other applications if you want to render and work simultaneously. In that case you should invest in a rendering card and a display card (in other words 2 graphics cards)
Have you tried Vray’s cloud rendering service? you can do a demo with 10 free credits (I think).
When our rendering guy was asking for a dedicated rendering machine we looked into options and settled on the cloud option rather than spending money on hardware. It allows you to render your scenes in the cloud, while continuing to work on modeling on your machine. The cost has a lot of variables, but our typical renders are coming in around 1-2 credits which is like $0.75-2.00 depending on how many credits you buy at a time (price per credit is lower if bought in bulk).
The rendering service is indeed great for final renders, but as mentioned before, for live previews it’s worth having a dedicated rendering and an extra display card IMHO. otherwise the whole interface might lag to a point where you can hardly cancel the render once you hit the live render button (there was an option to limit the card usage though, no?). depending on the complexity of the scene you want to watch the gigs vram. I’m getting the limits of my 8gb from time to time with larger interiors… I’ve recently read that the latest cycles on blender allows for nvlink to be used to combine the ram of two cards. I don’t know if V-Ray supports this too?
other than that switching to an ssd and 32gb of ram did wonders for me when working with large files.
A bit off topic, but has anybody tried Chaos Group’s Lavina yet?
Sorry, I have no idea how to setup a decent system. I would ask here:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/chaos-common/chaos-common-hardware
I use a 2950x, it’s a medium speed CPU, but good enough to feed the GPUs. I use one 1080ti for display and two 2080ti for rendering. I’m happy about the render speed. On my wishlist for the next year is a 3090 since it could double the speed (I’m not sure, we will see.)
I tested NVlink one year before but I got no possible scene size increase. If a scene of 8 complex blocks needs 11GB than it crashed with 10 blocks also in NVlink mode. Since one card is place outside my machine I can’t quick add the NVlink anymore. OK, I could place all cards in my machine, but than there is to much heat on the long run.
I’m a little bit lazy to test it again since NVlink cost some speed too and at the moment 11GB are enough for all my scenes. The 3090 (24GB) could allow me to render more complex scenes, but without the 2080ti. I think, this will be ok. So I could render 95% of my scenes per 2x2080ti+3090 and 5% of my scenes per 3090 only.
I wouldn’t spend any thoughts about how low the RAM setup could be. 
It makes so much more fun not to think about RAM so that I use 64GB. So, I can work on a complex scene, open a second complex scene without to close the first one, if an other client needs a quick render and don’t need to be angry about the long time to close/open the first scene. Also in this time can let Photoshop open, where I adjust a high res image. In the past 32GB wasn’t enough for me. I needed to close programms often.
Some times, for medium scenes, I use my display card 1080ti additional to the 2080ti, but some times, if to much memory is used and the display card crash, it can cause that a restart of the computer is needed. Best, don’t use the display card for rendering and the system is more stable.
Maybe the current discussion here could be interesting for you:
How much money you think to spend for your system?