I've been working my way through the beginner's learning flow and have been enjoying the exercises. The trouble is, my IT set up has not.
I'm running a Dell XPS-15 laptop with an NVIDIA GT 750M graphics card and it's pretty slow when rendering single frames - I've not got onto animations yet! Watching tutorials, others seem able to move around and edit scenes in viewport render mode with their systems responding quickly but I can't do that.
So I was wondering what equipment other people are using and how it performs for them. What I'd like to understand is the optimum mid-range set up which will cope with short animations and photorealistic scenes without becoming obsolete before it reaches the end!
(Just for info, I have set up Blender to streamline renders to the maximum extent (tiles sizes, restricted samples and light bounces etc) and I used GPU compute until I started getting CUDA errors but, to be honest, there didn't seem to be much difference between GPU and CPU.)
Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing other people's experiences.
Thanks in anticipation.
Ok, so i built the machine and it fired up on the first click so all is good (had a minor panic at the outset when the CPU went straight to 93 degrees C but the cooler wasn't seated properly - now it's fine at around 40 degrees). The twenty second animation now takes 24 hours to render instead of 14 days, which is terrific.
But i do have a question about it.
When i look at the system monitors, the CPU rarely gets above 10% utilisation, and the graphics cards, one rarely peaks at 50% and the second card is hardly used at all. I've got NVIDIA SLI configured and optimised for 3D, and i've got Blender seeing both cards and using GPU processing.
So my question is, why isn't Blender driving the hardware harder? To me it looks as though the machine could easily render the sequence in under 12 hours if it used more of the system. Have i got a bottleneck somewhere or is there a limitation to how fast Blender can work?
Incidentally, i put together another sequence of around 1200 objects falling under gravity with no materials and Simplify checked - and it takes forever to process the animation! It won't even update the viewport for each frame, it just jumps eight or ten frames at a time and the screen whites out in between so interrupting the animation is almost impossible.
I can't help feeling there's something not right here and any suggestions would be really appreciated. Thanks.