Rendering time vs Quality

I have been toying alot with PW2 and the higher settings vs the
standard....of course the default settings are ok. Even turing on some of
the mid-level settings (ie. indirect illumination, ray tracing, etc) there
is a definate jump in the quality level that is rendered.

Now here is where I start to get antasy (sp) Every now and then I try to
kill my PC and crank everythign up to the MAX....WHOO HOO...lets just say
that I walk away, make some popcorn, watch Gone with the wind twice and at
that point I look over at the computer and it is still "calculating indirect
illumination" lol...I am exaggerating, but the bottom line is.....trying to
factor in getting the most out of the settings. The picture quality seems to
not have as big a jump from default to mid-level as from mid-level to Max.

I know the factors of haveing a better computer, hardware and all, but this
is just more of a question of am I missing out on not using the highest
settings?

 

My dual Xeon 3.06Ghz with a gig of RAM takes a "long" time too. Much longer
than PW1.

 

We all know that PW2 takes longer than PW1, thats a given.....but dammm I
would think that at least with a 3ghz and 1gig of RAM would be like night
and day.

The program itself, from what I understand would not benfit from dual
processors, but I think someone once posted that PW does...i dunno.

 

I have heard that the processing for SolidWorks is quite linear just the
nature of the type of processing so it doesn't benefit too much from dual
processors only about 10% or something. I think Rendering in PhotoWorks
would also be linear. Although you would think that one processor could do
the bottom half of the model and the other do the top half. (Ignorance is
bliss)

Corey

 

Photoworks does take advantage, at least according to task manager. I have
not benchmarked so I dont know the time difference 1 vs. 2 processors.

 

Corey,

PhotoWorks2 (as well as PW1 if you enabled the option) are both fully
multi-threaded applications and take advantage of Dual Processors.
The rendering process is one that can actually be split up between
multiple processors very easily. If you watch PW2 as it is working it
renders little square regions of the image until the image is
complete. If you have a dual processor machine it will split out 1 of
these square regions to each processor. This is commonly referred to
as 'bucket rendering' - each little square being 1 bucket. The full
version of MentalRay (as well as many other rendering engines) can
even distribe these 'buckets' to other machines on your network - this
is commonly referred to as a RenderFarm - but that's all beside the
point as PW2 doesn't have this funcitonality.... yet. Basically,
rendering should be nearly twice as fast on a Dual processor system as
a single.


-brian
www.bxhdesigns.com

 

Hey guys,

Not to sound like a pain or anything, but is there a reason why you're
turning these values up so high? You should really only turn up the
settings to higher values if there are problems with your current
image. If you are getting some Anti-Aliasing artifacts then turn up
the Anti-Aliasing... if you're not, then it's just wasting processor
time to sit there and get nearly the same quality image as you got at
the lower settings. Likewise for indirect Illumination - Unless you
are getting heavy artifacts, there is really no need to turn up the
slider. The sliders have 'high' ends incase you need them for your
particular image - every scene and every model is different, so the
'best' setting for your model is not always going to be the same.

I like to kick back with a few beers and a movie everynow and then
while rendering too, but we all gotta pay the bills, and if there's
negligable difference when turning up the settings I'd advise against
it...

-b

 

Not that I make every image maxed out by any means. I am in agreement with
what you are saying. Just wanted to see if I was really missing anything by
not cranking up the volume. The time to quality issue was my real concern.

 

Is it just me...

or does PW2 (and maybe PW1, not sure) render a LOT faster if you "render to
file" as oppposed to the screen? I havent done any actual benchmarks on this
but it sure feels that way. I am rendering to JPG at 1024X768 with the
highest quality setting.....

Todd