Rendering Hardware

[Pete Wallington]

What are the most important hardware factors to increase speed of rendering?

I.e Ignoring software settings such as debayer quality etc.

Could someone give me a rough prioritised list along the lines of:
CPU (number and speed)
RAM
Drive speed

etc

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Depends on what your using to do the processing. Debayer quality will be a big factor, hard to ignore, but having said that if you are using Red apps, in Redcine you are heavily GPU based, so a good, compatible graphics card is a priority. If you are using Redline, Red Alert, it's more on the CPU side. If you are trying to go to 1080 or 720, I think you can get away with 1/2 Res High for most debayering processes. Only in certain situations will you need to use full. That alone speeds things up greatly. Having computers sharing the rendering tasks is how the big post houses are doing it. They are using collective horsepower to blast through footage. Us mortal souls with limited resources must choose the path of least resistence. Having fast hard drives will certainly help, and make sure the system has a decent amount of RAM, 8GB+ should be fine.

Hope this helps.

 

[Paul Leeming]

HDD throughput has been cited by Red as one of the main bottlenecks in both CPU and GPU based rendering. If your CPU or GPU is waiting for the hard drive to catch up it will notably affect performance and rendering times.

I've just installed two Patriot Warp 128GB SSD drives in my computer to trial, hooked up in RAID 0 using the 3ware 9650SE SATA RAID PCIe controller card which has 256MB of dedicated on board memory to assist. Will post here with results once I have time to empirically benchmark them in comparison with regular HDDs in both single and software RAID 0 configurations.

HTH

Paul

 

[Sean]

I didn't know Redcine had a "debayering option." Is that the Lossless, High, etc. setting in the Output menu?

(Paul, I'll be very interested in your render-test results.)

 

[Pete Wallington]

Very interesting, look forward to seeing your results, thanks Paul

 

[Adam Glick]

In all our testing, I'll give you what we've found.

1. CPU speed is by far the most important factor in determining the speed of processing 3rd files (using any utility or app)

**memory performance also seems to be key in getting better transcode and playback performance. But there isn't really much you can do to get the optimum memory bandwidth out of the the "'older" intel platform (Xeon 5400 series) currently in use by Macs and many windows workstations. The new Intel i7 platform provides triple the memory bandwidth -and we are guessing that part of the amazing performance boost we see with i7 is that this additional memory bandwidth lets the CPU do a more efficient job of debayering/decoding the footage.

2. "Target" drive performance, if not sufficiently speedy, will slow down the transcoding process. For the fastest dual-quad workstations using medium-quality debayering to 2K DPX, you will need a 3-drive (SATA) RAID0 stripe to keep transcoding performance at maximum efficiency. This setting is going to stress your storage more than just about any other.

Transcoding to compressed formats, higher quality debayer settings or creating 4K frames will slow down the compute stage of the process to the point that a 2-drive RAID0 stripe would probably suffice without slowing down the process.

3. GPU - almost any modern GPU has more than enough raw horsepower to apply the scaling and pixel shading required for running R3D transcoding applications at maximum speed. GPU should be your lowest priority in terms of putting together a system for transcoding.


Adam
BOXXlabs