Comparing Render Times

[largento]

I just put in a new graphics card in my Mac Pro. I'm going from a ATI 2600 with 256MB to an ATI 5870 with 1024MB.

 

I wondered if there'd be any difference in render times. I don't think it had any effect, but just to share the results.

 

 

This was a VGA size render with 16 passes and 60% Ambient Occlusion. No reflections, no hair.

 

Mac v17G = 8:43

Mac v18beta2 = 8:45

Win v17G (running under Parallels) = 7:23

 

That's a pretty big advantage to running the Windows version.

 

I'm not sure if it would make any difference to change the allotment of resources to Parallels. Right now, I'm letting it use 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores. I also gave it 512MB of graphics memory. I don't know if I can give it everything without causing problems, but I would think those were pretty good specs for a Windows computer.

 

The thing I was most happiest, is that I compared all three images using the "Difference" layer property in Photoshop and there wasn't a single pixel of difference. That's huge, since that was a big concern back in the day.

[robcat2075]

Probably the only final render element that might be graphics card dependent would be the Screen Space Ambient occlusion effect in v18, but that would not have been in play in your test anyway.

 

 

Looks like about an 18% penalty on render time for the mac which isn't too bad. it used to be many x worse in the Power PC days, i think.

[largento]

No, I didn't use that since it's not part of v17.

 

I hadn't thought of testing v16, but since I did have it, I tried it out and the result was: 10:50. I know v16 was unbelievably faster than v15.

 

I'm still running OS X 10.8, so there might be a difference based on the OS.