New graphics card

KenG

I want to reduce my rendering times with cc3. Is there anything I should look for in a new graphics card? My most intensive use for the pc is CC3 so that is the main reason for the upgrade.
Thanks Ken

Mateus090985

I may be wrong, but for rendering speed I think that the most important aspect is the CPU spped and after that your RAm. I think that graphic card is the third in the list.

Edit: I found a link: http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/183/

jslayton

CC3 doesn't use the graphics card for much beyond a frame buffer to display its final images, so a graphics card upgrade won't do too much to improve performance. However, screen resolution will make a huge impact, as CC3 needs to touch each pixel in its display area. Simply shrinking the CC3 window to half the screen vertical and horizontal can make a four times improvement in performance for certain files.

Because CC3 is a 32-bit program, you're not going to see much if any improvement in performance if you increase memory size after the first 3GB, (CC3 itself only uses 2GB unless it has the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE linker flag set).

After the number of pixels drawn in the main window, single-threaded integer CPU performance and CPU cache size should be the single greatest indicators of performance for the program.

An amusing community project would be to decide on a set of .fcw files and screen resolutions and then use those files to collect performance data for those files, including screen resolution, pixel depth, CPU model, and memory speed. Objective and repeatable testing is really the best way to see see the effects of varying elements in the system.

KenG

Great info.
How do I set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE marker. My machine has 16 gb of ram, bummer it isnt getting used.
Ill try adjusting the resolution.
Any other suggestions on revving up the speed, testing effects and exporting are so slow.

Monsen

You can't set that flag yourself, that is set when the program is initially compiled in preparation for distribution. It is not as simple as just turning this on however, the program code must support it. In any case, this only allows the program to use 4 GB of RAM instead of the usual 2 for a 32 bit app, so it still wouldn't take proper advantage of all your ram (although going from 2 to 4 should allow you to render higher resolution exports, I don't believe it would be very much faster)

jslayton

It is possible to set the flag after initial program compilation ( http://gisgeek.blogspot.com/2012/01/set-32bit-executable-largeaddressaware.html shows one way), but setting it will be bad if the program doesn't properly understand the full 32 pointer size (some old assembly language programs, for example, would use that uppermost bit on pointers to indicate user-defined information). The original 32-bit Windows system allocated half of the address space (2GB for the system and the other half for user programs), but Windows can shrink its footprint in a 32-bit process if you are running on 64-bit Windows.

As Monsen points out, there is still a less-than-4GB limit on 32-bit processes, even with the flag set. Setting this flag would be unsupported by ProFantasy, I'd bet.

KenG

Well I guess you can't blame a guy for trying.
Thanks for the suggestions,
Ken