rendering issues

    • July 10, 2017 at 1:09 pm #138334
      Angela
      Participant

      I’m having issues with the quality of my renderings. I just got a new computer that is more than capable of running the program – and others at the same time. In fact the rendering quality was one of the reasons I upgraded!

      Here are the problems I’m having:
      In quick rendering mode, I’m getting lots of jagged edges. Even set to high quality.
      In high resolution rendering mode, I’m getting quite a bit of pixilation and the door is rendering as if it’s on fire – completely over exposed. Even if I turn the Sun visibility to off.

    • July 10, 2017 at 2:37 pm #138376
      Danny Steiger
      Pilot Pro

      I am having similar issues.  I’m not sure if I had them in 11.7 or not, but definitely in 11.8.

      I also find it frustrating that I can do a live perspective (where you can move the camera around, etc) with Texture with Edges and while I’m moving it around things look great… as soon as I stop it completely pixelates and takes a minute or two until it’s at the same quality it was when I was moving it around.

      I understand that it’s computing shadows and all the details, but it make live presentations to customers when I’m modifying design, etc, very inconvenient.

    • July 10, 2017 at 3:50 pm #138418
      Veronica Arabudzki
      Participant

      We’ve had the same issue. We were hoping that upgrading to 11.7, now 11.8, would help but it hasn’t. I don’t even bother doing a full rendering because it takes an hour…and that’s not exaggerating. It literally takes 30-60 minutes for a full rendering to complete. If I do a simple refresh and the highest quality in the Preferences and in the Perspective/Rendering window, this what I get (see attached).

      We have gaming computers that are supposed to be able to handle high resolution videos and pictures. Apparently something isn’t jiving…

    • July 11, 2017 at 8:55 pm #138520

      The rendering engine definitely needs work – I see competitors products that produce almost perfect photo realistic renders in real time (albeit the software costs twice as much or more).

      When it comes to on-screen rendering it’s partly the graphics card and partly the processor. I REALLY recommend being on a late model Intel i7 processor running at the fastest possible speed – 3.4GHz or above is preferable. As for the graphics card, this seems to be less important but typically a 2GB Nvidia or AMD Radeon seems adequate.

      Since 2020 Design is currently a 32 bit program, having maximum memory available to the application is advisable and if I am working on some really flashy designs, I now have a habit of rebooting the computer, disable just about every other running program including antivirus and then run the render.

      Versions prior to V11.7 (I think – it may be V11.8) had the rendering program as part of the design program and thereforte suffered from running out of memory – later versions have the rendering software run as a seperate program and therefore don’t suffer the same issues.

      Using custom textures and Sketchup shapes also slow down rendering significantly – try sticking to standard textures and use 2020 Cloud shapes if possible.

    • July 11, 2017 at 10:05 pm #138522

      Just so you have some comparative timings I did a test. On my modest i7-2.4GHz Toshiba notebooik with 2GB AMD Radeon I get the following:

      Onscreen standard render takes 7 seconds

      Clicking the photo realistic option takes 5 minutes

      Saving as high res image 2K resolution takes 7 minutes

      Saving as high res image 4K resolution takes 40 minutes

      I then printed both images out sized to fit an A4 sheet of paper on our big flashy Sharp Copier/Printer and could see little to no difference between the 2K and 4K images.

      When I render onscreen I don’t render fullscreen as it is unneccesary most of the time. A smaller render window means a faster render time. As you can see from the above times, doubling the (save as) image size results in the render time increasing by 600% so unless you need the very high res images then there is no point in creating them.

      Hope this helps. It might be an idea for you to post the specification of your PC – I use the free SPECCY tool for this.

      Attachments:
    • July 12, 2017 at 1:09 pm #138588
      Angela
      Participant

      Seeing now that are others are having similar issues, I’m lead to believe that this is a 2020 issue. My computer is brand new, as in I just got it Saturday! It has an i7 processor, 16gb memory with a 2gb Nvidia graphics card. It’s more than capable of doing the job. Since It’s a brand new computer and it’s not loaded with junk like my previous 7 yr old machine, I was really hoping for better results.

       

      Mike, The attachment.. is that the his res 4k rendering? It looks pretty sharp!

      Veronica, yes it’s so frustrating, my results are similar to what you shared and described.

    • July 12, 2017 at 7:09 pm #138606

      Hi Angela,

      Make sure that your 2020 Design is running using the Nvidia as the default graphics processor (it’s a setting in the Nvidia control panel).

      The image was the 2K fast one – this forum doesn’t allow larger attachments. The 4K (3K in size, 4K in resolution) one is here:

      https://www.dropbox.com/s/yn14nyvsops7hmn/Example.jpg?dl=0

      Honestly though, I don’t see why you would bother with a 4K render under most circumstances. The average inkjet or laser will do a good jub of blurring (think primitive antialiasing) the edges of lines for you.

      As I mentioned, there are a few things to try when running the render but the most important is to close off as many other processes as possible including anti-virus. Also there are certain anti-virus programs that people just should not be using and these are Nortons/Symantec, Mcafee, AVG and probably a few others. Good ones are Bitdefender, Avira, Avast but I only use the built in Microsoft one with an occasional scan using Malwarebytes.

      Also try and get rid of any bloatware on your system – if it isn’t necessary, uninstall it.

    • July 12, 2017 at 11:03 pm #138609
      Angela
      Participant

      Mike,

      Thanks so much for the information, especially regarding the graphics card as the default graphics processor.. I didn’t even know about that.

      Unfortunately I don’t know much about antivirus software, It’s all just way over my head. My computer came with McAfee so I’ll see what I can find out about that.

      Yes, your right, not much difference between the 2k and 4k rendering from what I could tell…just a slight improvement.

       

    • July 12, 2017 at 11:31 pm #138611

      No worries – you can usually check by right button clicking on the Design icon on your desktop and it should say something like ‘Run with High Performance Graphics Adapter (default)’ – if it doewsn’t have the default option in brackets then it may be running in a slower mode.

      100% definitely uininstall Mcaffee – it’s what we in IT call a ‘Process and Resources Hog’ and is possibly the worst antivirus out there for both slowing down your computer AND being poor on virus detection. I’d just uninstall Mcaffee and use the one built into Windows – what version of Windows are you on? If Windows 7 , download Security Essentials from Microsoft. If Windows 8 and newer, use the built in Microsoft Defender. Both are surprisingly good and very optimised to keep Windows as fast as possible.

    • July 13, 2017 at 2:12 pm #138766
      Veronica Arabudzki
      Participant

      I may just have to try that as well: shutting down all other programs then trying to render.

      Glad to know we’re not alone in this! 😉

    • July 19, 2017 at 5:57 pm #139758
      Danny Steiger
      Pilot Pro

       

      I had another rendering issue, but resolved it in this instance, so I’m “deleting” my post.

      For other info on rendering, however, here’s the specs of the computer that I work with, and I’ve been frustrated with both the quality of renders and the speed in the latest version…

      Here’s my specs:

      2.6 i7-6700HQ
      16 GB RAM
      GTX-980M 4GB GDDR5
      SSD

      Attachments:
    • January 4, 2018 at 6:37 pm #165094
      Jon Hazlett
      Participant

      Hi everyone – pardon the account. My wife’s the designer and I’m the husband who works in IT.

      I repurposed an old server for her a few years ago with a pair of Xeon X5650 (2.66Ghz, 6c/12t)  processors in it – a total of 24 process threads. It plowed through renders but had some other issues – namely it’s a server-class system that didn’t support things like standby or audio very well. As a workstation, it wasn’t cutting it – plus, at nearly 7 years old it was getting old and throwing some other odd issues.

      I rebuilt the machine on a bit of a budget this time around using an i7 7700K (4.2Ghz, 4c/8t), good price on Amazon at the time. All-around this computer is a superior workstation, however it’s HQ render times increased about four-fold. Well, I went from 24 threads to 8 threads… makes sense to me.

      Today, one of my colleagues had a Dell Precision with a Xeon W-2104 (3.2Ghz, 4c/8t) in it delivered. I figured I’d try to do some benchmarking before putting it in to production.

      Consider all other factors equal. NVMe SSDs, 16-48Gb RAM (anything >16Gb has no effect I can tell), GTX1060 or Quadro P2000 video cards, etc. I’m only looking at raw compute speed in HQ rendering mode. The attached is a test kitchen she whipped up real fast just as a rendering test (maybe it’s a standard demo? I donno). It only uses the default catalogs so anyone can open it.

      I was completely blown away that 2020 doesn’t have a fixed resolution for rendering HQ images and instead relies on window size for this. As a side question – is there any way to specify the resolution for an HQ render before opening the HQ render screen?

      For the purposes of my benchmarking, the window was simply full-screened (so very close to 1920×1200 or 1920×1080, depending on the rig). I’ve watched clock speeds and utilization levels across the systems and can confirm it really doesn’t care what video card you have in HQ render – that’s 100% CPU based. GPU is only used for the fast’n’dirty rendering done while you move your view around.

      Anywho – here’s what I saw on the various platforms:

      • 2x X5650: 44s
      • i7 7700K: 2m53s
      • W-2104: 6m48s

      As best I can tell, the move to Xeon – aside from getting high thread counts – has no positive impact at all on 2020. It may even be a detriment, for some reason. All this thing cares about is the number of threads you can give it.

      That said – I’ll send a beer’s worth of money to anyone out there with an 1950X Threadripper who can run this render for me and tell me how long it took. I really don’t want to plunk down another $1100 on her computer if it’s not going to be a sizeable improvement.

      Attachments:
    • January 4, 2018 at 7:00 pm #165113
      Jon Hazlett
      Participant

      Just realized this probably wasn’t the right thread to post under – didn’t mean to hijack! Since I can’t find a way to delete this post… I’ve simply moved my question to here.

    • January 11, 2018 at 1:35 pm #166121
      Dan Barker
      Spectator

      Speed isn’t my main concern with the rendering, but the quality is a huge issue for me. I have used numerous architectural programs through the years and 2020’s rendering engine is the most problematic I’ve ever encountered. Bizarre shadows that have no logical source, odd burned-out highlights that will arbitrarily appear on glass (we do a lot of bathrooms with large glass shower surrounds), shadows that disappear when viewed through glass, windows that appear radically different behind glass, etc. And in my experience the highest rendering mode is for all intents and purposes useless. The rooms appear significantly darker, there are pixel artifacts often scattered across the images, reflections in glass are on steroids (i.e., a window that doesn’t reflect on the shower glass at all in High mode will be almost photographically rendered on the glass), strange textures showing up on some surfaces, etc.

    • March 8, 2018 at 10:51 am #175805
      Dawn
      Participant

      I work for a pretty large company regarding the 20-20 program (650 + computers). We are currently using version 10 and are working on a PC upgrade, Windows 10 and version 11.8. I was under the impression that as of version 11, the renderings are being handled by a program outside the 20-20 program. As I was told, this would make the 20-20 program more stable and would take less time rendering. From reading here, this is not the case at all. Besides making this comment, I am beginning to think that we should hold off on upgrading. I would appreciate feedback Mike.

    • March 8, 2018 at 6:05 pm #175807

      I support a pile (20+) of designers now rather than designing myself but I would say my experience is the opposite. We held off on leaving V9 due to the bugs in V10 but I have now rolled out V11.8.2.13 to all my designers and most of them are very happy with the rendering (the few that aren’t are either stick in the muds or on a slower PC).

      Honestly, my experience with V11.8 has been pretty much positive. Sure there are a few issues as there will be in any software package but there are usually workarounds. If I had to downgrade now, I’d rather go back to V9 as my V10 experiences were so negative.

    • March 9, 2018 at 6:55 am #175812
      Dawn
      Participant

      Thank you very much Mike. I’ve supported designers for 20 years now and reading your issues and replies on this site has always been good information for me. Appreciate it!

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