[Jason Shughart]

We are in the process of bidding on new computers for our designers and wondered which setup would be more effective. We use 2020 Design for kitchen design.

1. Buying each designer a high powered mobile workstation/gaming laptop and having them do their 3D renderings on their own machine

2. Buying each designer a standard business class machine so they can design while on the move and having one desktop graphics workstation (most likely powered by Xeon) to have to make 3D renderings as necessary (sort of a mini render farm, but we only have two designers, so only one machine would be needed)

Does GPU make a serious difference in rendering time or is it all CPU based? Some of our renders now take a long time (30+ minutes).

Any ideas in this matter would be appreciated – thank you!

[Neil Wilson]

Hi Jason,

I would go with option 1.  There is functionality in the program that uses the GPU that will cause issues if there is not a dedicated card present in the machine.  Stuff like opening attributes windows and anything that provides a visual preview of the items will work better with a dedicated card.

Right now in the software any render that you can manipulate, attribute previews, initial renders etc… is handled by the GPU.  Renders that are static like the final render created by clicking the re-render/realtime button in the rendering or the 360 panoramic renderings are handled by the CPU.

Neil

Love the Avatar by the way 🙂

[Jason Shughart]

Would it be worth it to have a mini render farm for speed purposes? Old xeon workstations are very easy to come by and are still extremely competitive with even today’s machines.

[Mike Langensiepen]

The only advantage a Xeon system would give you is if you move to the Panoramic 360 renders. These use the processor exclusively and don’t use the graphics card (at least as far as my testing shows). This makes Xeon systems very attractive in terms of throughput for the Panoramics.

You need to think about the future – will Panoramic 360s become important or not? My feeling is that with everybody using smartphones and tablets that the Panoramic 360 is going to become a big selling point – particularly as the client base evolves. Currently our client base consists of a large portion of less technologically literate clients for whom a printed picture is useful but even then we have noticed that more and more clients come in with the emailed pictures on a tablet or phablet. When we have sent these people Panoramics, they have been far more enthusiastic.

However, if your Designers do their design and selling on-site (ours do not) then go for an i7 notebook (as fast an i7 as you can afford) with a dedicated NVidia or AMD graphics processor.

What you choose is really defined by the way you sell. Because our clients visit us at the showrooms, we are looking at putting in lounge areas with large screen TVs and showing them Panoramic 360s using an iPAD or Samsung tablet mirrored to the TV. We’ll bring them in, sit them down with a nice coffee and biscuits and blow their mind by letting them wander round the kitchen using the tablet for control.

[Jason Shughart]

Never thought of that! Thanks Mike!