Would you change anything about this setup?

[creative_surfer]

Hi all,

I'm wondering whether there is anything I can do to my set up which would help with Corona rendering speed in Cinema 4d, this is my current set up:

Threadripper 1950X (16 core)
32gb RAM
GeForce 8Gb GTX1080
250Gb SSD

Will I notice a significant improvement in speed by overclocking the Ryzen? Sounds like it will generally go to 3.8-3.9 GHz OC'd.

I was experimenting with landscape forms (mountain ranges) and terrain mask to create snow in C4d recently and found it really choked up my machine for 1024x1024 72dpi image. Even 'stopping' the render was a pain as my mouse was jumping around all over the place - not sure what would cause this, just the CPU being maxed out? I understand overclocking isn't going to take ages to set up or anything (haven't done it before), so I guess I can just try it and compare?

My Corona benchmark results attached, 1min 15s.

I know this isn't particularly slow, but it does tend to feel a bit painful when following a tutorial and their interactive render regions are just constantly updating while they work, I guess they're running very expensive CPU's and that's just life....

Thank you.

[Nejc Kilar]

Actually I can atest that even when you have dual 2696 some scenes just aren't that easy for the IR - You can't expect everything to render in 10 seconds :P That being said, it usually works like a charm :) Worth the money, heh! So basically the 1950x is a really awesome CPU for rendering so you shouldn't have low expectations.

When your mouse lags like crazy it usually means you've ran out of RAM and the disk is super busy swapping data to it. If that is really the case then do check the Task Manager and look at your RAM consumption as you render.

You should always work with instances and stuff like that. Also, if you are doing an exterior scene make sure you are forcing the IR to use PT / PT for GI. That way you avoid those huge slowdowns that the UHD can do if there is a ton of complicated light bounces. Another thing you can try, if you want to keep rendering with UHD is to set its accuracy to something absurd like 0,1. That will speed up the IR considerably if it has a hard time refreshing.

Another thing that I've noticed myself, the IR in c4d is a lot less smooth and responsive than its 3ds Max counterpart. On my particular configuration its pretty much unusable at its current state because even a simple cube and a light will make everything lag as crazy.

Rock on dude!

[creative_surfer]

Thank you for a very thorough reply!

I didn’t know about a lot of these settings so I will check them out and see how it goes.

I also started testing a bit of overclocking last night with Ryzen Master, and quickly realised I was naive to think it was a quick process :-D

Anyway, I was only using the Corona benchmark to check if performance was improving at at all. I’m guessing I should be trying other benchmarks too, to check for stability, as well as actually in C4D. The best I got to was 1.12secs, down from the 1.15secs, which doesn’t seem like much but I guess it’s a 4% improvement. I need to play with it a bit more but I’m concerned about temperatures, there’s a lot of conflicting posts online about the 1950x not going above 68 degrees C? Supposedly this is when thermal throttling kicks in. I edged it over this temperature and all 16 cores were running just fine with no reduction, but I’m not sure what temperatures are safe for a long render for example. I don’t want to fry my expensive new computer!

Regarding the RAM, I will check later when at home again and monitor it during the mountain range render and see what happens. Am I right in saying the RAM clocking can be ramped up too? At the moment it’s at 1200 Mhz.

Sorry for all the noob questions.

[Nejc Kilar]

I personally think that as long as you are getting appropriate benchmark times you are pretty much good to go. Overclocking a 1950x shouldn't be that big of a deal but as you've probably noticed the net increase in speed is sometimes not really worth it. Still, I think pushing it to about 4ghz is still considered somewhat normal I guess.

I personally don't do that. I prefer the temperatures to be lower and the lifespan of the CPU longer. Granted, CPUs are apparently a sturdy bunch and usually die after most other parts die as well.

Oh and don't forget, Threadripper has a temperature offset of about 20 degrees. So that means the actual core temperature is lower. I still however wouldn't push it beyond 60-70 (with the offset included) on a 24/7 rig. I prefer my CPUs to not sweat :)

[creative_surfer]

Thanks for the reply! I knocked everything back a bit and actually the performance improved a tad, so I may have found the sweet spot for my card, and got 1m 11s on the Corona benchmark. I've been using it for a while and temperatures and performance are good, so I think I'll keep it like this for now. I've left the RAM as it is as I don't reeeeally know what I'm doing there and it seems to have plenty in reserve.

[Nejc Kilar]

Great to hear its working great! Just don't up the core voltage too much, right?! :P

[creative_surfer]

Only 1.275, from what I've seen people seem to go up to 1.5/1.6 so I think this is pretty 'safe'. I think I might be able to knock that back a little but it needs tested bit by bit and I decided I better actually get on with some work today! :)

[Nejc Kilar]

I know the feeling, ha! Sometimes we spend too much time optimizing stuff when we could have done much more by just doing the work :) But if you enjoy tweaking the knobs... Well, why not. I can't say no to it myself :))