Modeling Speed vs. Rendering Speed

[Anwar]

Since I render with V-Ray and use the GPU, and that only works on PC, I need to stick with the PC for that purpose.  However, are modeling operations any faster on the Mac?  Is it better to model on a Mac and render on a PC, or is there no speed difference between the platforms for modeling?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks,

Anwar

 

[¢hris £und]

What operations do you think need a speed boost?   We can run some tests.

[Justin Montoya]

I've used both platforms for modeling and rendering with VRay, extensively and in my experience there is not a difference in modeling speed on the two platforms with similar hardware.  However, Mac hardware seems to be always behind new PC hardware, so a newer and faster PC does make for faster workflow, in both modeling and rendering.

That said, modeling operations are generally not that taxing to the system unless you are working with really large scenes and/or many complex objects. This is an area where FormZ has struggled in the past and I believe the new FormZ v9 will help to address this as a whole. 

[AsOne]

Your modeling speed it tied to the speed of your single CPU cores, given FormZ only uses one CPU core for modeling at a time.   Rendering takes advantage of multiple CPU cores or in your case GPU cores.   I would imagine that Justin is correct - Mac vs. Windows operating systems won't make too much a difference in modeling speed.  It is the hardware setup that matters.

I don't run PC's, but I find v8.6 models quite fast on the latest iMacs.

[Anwar]

Hi Chris and everyone,

Thanks for your replies.  Chris, the three operations in modeling I have found that can be painfully slow on PC's are:

1) Moving large objects with 10s of thousands of faces

2) Using booleans to carve up large terrain models (again, for sites more than a mile across with many thousands of faces)

3) Generating hidden lines of scenes with objects containing 10s of thousands of faces

Do any of these perform better on a Mac?

 

Thanks,
Anwar

 

[¢hris £und]

Though, I think as the others, this probably isn't a place where the mac would be better or worse.  as, AsOne notes.  it is only a single core that is being used for these operations.

The only reason why a mac may be better is in the Pro models that use the workstation CPU.  Xeon Chips.     But frankly, apple/Intel has not done such a great job of keeping these chips on the same trajectory as the "i" series has.  Unless you want to dump a crap load of money for the newest models that have been announced.   I think I will opt for an i9 machine and hackintosh it.

 

Available RAM could be a factor.  

 

If you want though, it would be interesting to see what the xeon chips could compare against...  my xeon based pro is 7 years old.  my i7 mac is 5.

The thing to do would be to post a file and what the operation on it would be so that we could benchmark oranges for oranges.

 

 

[Justin Montoya]

On 10/23/2019 at 2:48 PM, Anwar said:

Hi Chris and everyone,

Thanks for your replies.  Chris, the three operations in modeling I have found that can be painfully slow on PC's are:

1) Moving large objects with 10s of thousands of faces

2) Using booleans to carve up large terrain models (again, for sites more than a mile across with many thousands of faces)

3) Generating hidden lines of scenes with objects containing 10s of thousands of faces

Do any of these perform better on a Mac?

 

Thanks,
Anwar

 

Howdy!

Mac vs PC shouldn't make any difference in modeling here.  Hardware and software are going to make the biggest difference.  Can you share the PC specs?  If compared to a similarly spec'd Mac CPU, FormZ will behave similarly.  You described single core operations which will benefit from the fastest CPU (boost) speed you can get.   HOWEVER, FormZ can really struggle with large and complex objects and scenes.  Especially if they are not built from scratch within FormZ, ie IMPORTED GEOMETRY.  This is supposed to have been improved in the v9 Beta as FormZ has a new core capable of dealing with larger scenes and geometry.  Waiting to test and find out...

There is a faster Hidden Line method you could try to help with #3 - 

Cheers!