Just wanted some advice on the best specs to render and bake light maps.
Is it cores, memory, video card, SSD that affects speed the most? Or all of them?
How much can you speed up render times by increasing specs? Meaning, is it a drastic difference to go from an i7 with 4 cores to an i7 with 8 cores? Will it cut times in half? Go from a 12 hour render to 6?
What will cut times down the most. Is there a spec (memory, processor, cores, SSD, video card) that will drastically cut down render times for large scenes? Or do you get diminishing returns at some point?
Does it make sense to have a render machine that is fully loaded and optimized versus your dev machine? What happens to production time? Do people work on other areas of the project while renders are happening?
Thanks for the help. Just looking to optimize render time and hot spend 24 hours rendering scenes/maps.
That 24 hours must have hurt! It is pretty much the case, with more horse power (processor most important) you get better speed, there is however a level of uncertainty on very large scales, and might require careful design and monitoring to keep the rig in best performance. Video card have no contribution to the light baking process, but previewing it in the editor viewport only which is ideal to keep in high profile for the better user experience. SSD is always preferred over HDD regardless of the usage area, it is the best you can just get for Unreal to support the file system operations, tho it have lesser contribution to the actual baking proc. If it really holds you up, it makes sense to fire up a separate build machine that can do the processing while you continue to work on something else.
Ram and Cpu for lightmass. If I could I would have a minimum of 32gb or ram in my machine but ideally 64. I have only 16 and it’s a limiting factor sometimes.
Don’t forget that you can use the swarm agent with a pc farm to speed up the light build. I would also suggest to not go too overkill with the lightmass quality settings and don’t mess with the ini files ont top of that if that’s your case. It can really blow up build time!
24 hours build should not really happen nowadays with lightmass portals and default ini. Unless you are trying to bake an open world map or something huge.
Does anyone have an idea (even a rough one) of how much time is cut with better machines? Can you get rendering down from several hours to several minutes if you have a powerful enough machine? Or are the differences much smaller in time saved as you upgrade processor power, cores, memory, vid card, ssd dive,etc.
Just curious how much time you can cut by going from a $1K system to $2.5K to $10K? If it only saves a few minutes on hour long renders is it worth it? If it is cutting time in half or more it might be worth it then.
Will 64GB ram be significantly faster than 32GB? 8 cores vs 4? I know it will be faster, just curious if it is a dramatic difference.
Here you can get a rough estimate regarding which cpu model can perform on what speed. The mark will tell you just that. Price have little to doing with it, usually the trending cpu’s that have sold the most have the better price/power value.
I have experienced about +2x of the speed, but it is a important to note the characteristic of the CPU is a tad bit different, meaning the more cpu cores can work just fine under heavy load, but individual cores which are being used for simple programs will less benefit from the performance improvements, and they usually just work as before. I can however fire up 10x as many programs to run simultaneously which is where the true power can be first measured. Both Single and Multithreaded mark results can be read on the chart to better understand the performance gain on both cases. More core is better support for multithreaded applications (eg light baking).
CPU power will not level with price. Always look for the price/value charts on the website above to get a better estimate of a value of a CPU.
It can, yes and newer CPU models will always provide you better solutions for given computing problems where it helps the performance even better.
Can be, but only if you would run out of ram. 32GB is a lot, 64gb might be an overkill afterall, but it depends on your use case obviously.
Edit: Just like @heartlessphil have mentioned the project settings indeed can have huge impact on the rendering speed as well, so you are better to optimize on both fronts. Hardware upgrades are only should considered, once you are running out of software optimizations.