I work for an commercial interior refurbishment company. I have began using autocad architecture 2009 for 3D rendering on the work computer. It copes with the modelling quite well but when it comes to rendering a view of the room i have modelled, It takes quite some time. I know that you must be patient with 3d rendering but i left the computer rendering a 1024x768 res image on 'presentation' preset starting Friday evening...by Monday morning it had only rendered 3/4 of the image. Since then I have added 2gb of ram to the sytem. (4gb total) But I'm sure a processor upgrade will be crucial. Here is some screenshots of cpu-z: We would like to be able to render high-res images so that we have more quality to present....and we also want to move on to 3D animated walkthroughs of a room etc. wich is impossible on our systems on a realistic time scale. e.g. 'overnight rendering' (at some point in the future we would also like to start using 3D studio max) What system/upgrades would you recommend for our needs?
Wow, 80 hours for an image, that's some rendering, and your CPU isn't even that slow. My only real recommendation is to change to a Quad core based system. Since you use a socket AM2 board you can use something like a Phenom 9850, but realistically you may be better off moving to an intel platform to use a Q9450 Core 2 Quad instead. The latter are exceptionally fast CPUs.
isn't that where workstation graphics cards come in? like the ATi FireGL and the nVidia Quadro. be warned, they are very expensive. you will guaranteed have to replace the power supply with a quality, high watt one.
Ahh, you raise a valid point there. 3DSMax uses the GPU, but I don't know about Autocad, if it does that explains why it's taking so long, or might. What graphics card are you using? For serious rendering work, FireGLs or QuadroFXs are the better option - of course that does mean serious money.
after reading some reviews on newegg, autocad does rely on workstation graphics card. workstation cards are way more expensive than traditional graphics cards, so don't be suprised at the prices. according to cpu-z, it looks like you don't have a pci-e x16 slot. do you know what slots you do have? also, phenom quad cores are only for the socket AM2+; note the +.
It does actually, the Foxconn 6150M2MA comes with a PCIe 16x slot at the bottom. If you're using a microATX case though, you will experience space issues trying to fit a workstation graphics card, as they take up two slots.
