Expert: Andre Hickman - 10/21/2008

Question
Ok, hope the fact this is a Mac platform question doesn't ruin it.  I run Maya 2008 on a first generation Pro Mac with a Radeon1900XT GPU (that came with the mac).  Rendering is impossibly slow, 24 hours for 24 seconds of basic NTSC video output on fairly advanced 3d model.  Are there any GPUs I could upgrade to on this platform that would improve my situation significantly?

Thanks,

James

Answer
Hey James,

I don't know much about Mac processors, so I can't really speak on the first gen Pro Mac and it's processing speed.  

This is what you need to know though, and everyone makes this mistake in thinking...You GPU really has nothing to do with render speed.  The graphics card really only deals with live application, such as the refresh rate when you are working in the program, and if you have live effects such as anti-aliasing or texturing or reflections in a "live draw" mode (like manipulating live like a video game). That is why you can build a render farm (network of machines all rendering individual frames simultaneously to make the render faster) with barebones components, because the render is based on the CPU, and if you are just using the machine to render frames, who cares what GPU is in it.

24 secs of animation is about 720 frames.  With that, you are averaging about 2 minutes per frame.  I'm not sure how complex your scene is, or what effects you are using in it, but that's actually not too bad of a render speed at all(assuming that it is a complex scene or model.)

What you need to look for to speed up rendering is things like using raytracing in your render. If you are using raytracing, you may want to work out a way to "fake it" with reflection maps and things like HDR images as environmental maps.  Raytracing is the number one killer of speed, and for the average workstation should only be used for still renders, and not animation.

Another thing is if you have more than one mac, learn how to use them together, by installing maya on the others, to do a network render.  Your primary machine will basically farm out a frame to each computer, and when that computer has finished rendering the frame and saved it to the specified location for the file sequence, then the primary machine assigns it another frame. You can see that with one additional computer (CPU), CPU1 may end up getting assigned frames 1,3,5,7... and CPU2 2,4,6,8... and doing the renders simultaneously, you cut your render time in half.  If there were 3 CPU's or 4, or 20...well you get the idea.

That is basically how the big boys do it.  Multiple computers. A better Graphics card really is not going to help you at all. Sorry. Too bad you are not a PC guy.  Then you could buy 3 or 4 refurbs for about 100 bucks each, and start a little render farm! Not as easy with a mac, unless you can get them talking well on a network, and Maya's network rendering allows for cross operating system renders.

Cheers,
Andre'