[David Dachenhaus]

I am part of the IT group that services a business that uses your software. They are looking at doing some hardware upgrading to make 2020 faster. I have done a bit of research and even called in to ask, but really haven’t found a huge amount on this. Currently the computer they have is an i5, 2.9ghz quad-core (no HT) with 4GB ram. Would at this point upgrading from a 750 TI to a 1050 TI or 1070 really improve the rendering performance with the CPU being what it is, or should they upgrade the CPU/RAM first. I have read that 2020 utilizes both CPU and GPU but I have seen conflicting opinions on what it uses more.

The gentleman I spoke with on the phone seemed to look up a spec sheet on the internet and tell me the specs of the cards, which I already knew. He said “In his opinion the GPU would make it faster, but didn’t know by how much.”

I will be discussing the hardware options with them, but would like to be informed before I tell them what will actually make the software run faster and whatnot.

[Mike Langensiepen]

There is no easy answer because a lot depends on how you use 2020 Design. If you want to do a lot of Panoramic 360 renderings then the processor is the bottleneck (doing a panoramic render maxes out all the cores/threads on my i7 completely) but if you are only doing standard renderings then having a decent graphics card helps.

I’ve personally found the biggest difference in use to be linked to the processor speed – if you can overclock the existing i5 then do so but also upgrade the RAM to 8GB and put in a decent card such as the Nvidia GTX1050 (try and stay away from AMD COMPLETELY). A higher spec card than the 1050 only marginally improves rendering speed if at all.

However, you can buy a new computer for not much more than upgrading the old one so I would recommend upgrading the computer completely. The ideal scenario is an i7 or top end Xeon running at the fastest possible speed and coupled with a decent (don’t go overboard) graphics card such as the NVidia GTX1050. 8GB of RAM is a must and an SSD boot drive makes for a happy user.