Best Hardware and settings for Cinema 4D r14

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Cinema is pretty well optimized out of the box. I have essentially the same hardware and I haven’t felt the need to change any of the default hardware settings. I don’t think you’ll get much better performance by upgrading your video card. The top ATI cards tend to benchmark better in Cinema, but I avoid them because ATI doesn’t have the best track record with OpenGL drivers.

[Dell Anderson]

windows 7
Asus P9X79 PRO
GTX 580 3Gb
intel i7-3930K
64Gb ram 1600Mhz
Cinema 4d r14

Great info. Wow that’s a monster! 😉 I’m considering building a long overdue replacement for my outdated C4DR14 homebuilt hardware.

Last computer was a maxed out Intel motherboard with 32 bit OS (and you know what that means for RAM…). Anyone know of Intel alternatives to Asus P9X79 Pro or is that the one to get? I like to stay Intel when I can.

best,

Dell Anderson

PS Michael, is your GTX580 really 3Gb or 1.5? If so, where did you find it (this series appears to be no longer available new but seems to be the sweet spot price/performance for C4D and Blender. I understand that C4D does not use GPU rendering, but Blender does and 580 works well, only the issue of limited memory.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I like the Asus boards. I’m using the Sabertooth X79 which is similar to the Pro.

There are GTX 580s with 3 GB RAM — I have one and you can still find them on EBay. It is a good GPU and actually performs better for GPU rendering than most of the 600 series cards.

You might check out Octane Render if you’re interested in GPU rendering with Cinema. They recently came out with a C4D bridge. I just got it a couple weeks ago and I think it’s great. Pretty cheap, too, as render engines go. It’s very fast even on a single 580.

[Michael Garske]

Thanks for the info Adam! Yeah I went with the 580 3Gb vs. any of the 600 series for the After Effects benchmarks I saw in a few forums. What about the 700 series? Is there anywhere I can find a comparison of performance for the newer cards? Also is there any benefit to be had with multiple GPUs?

Also, is there any place I can go for information about rumors for new releases of C4D and possible future specs?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

In most applications the 780 is faster than the 580, but I haven’t seen any AE benchmark comparisons. Here’s a good review with lots of other benchmarks: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-780-performance-review,3516.html

Multi-gpu has no benefit for Cinema, unless you use Octane, and generally speaking most nVidia cards give similar results in Cinema, which is really more dependent on cpu, even when it comes to OpenGL. Not sure about AE, but any CUDA-based application should benefit from multiple GPUs. I don’t know if AE benefits from SLI.

[Michael Garske]

Wow! I just looked into Octane and that looks very exciting. Im going to put another gtx 580 in my system will it be able to utilize that? Also what kind of speed increase have you seen in using it? My first render took 17 hours and I’m definitely not used to those kinds of render times. This looks like a real time saver.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Yes, the thing to know about Octane is that it can use as many GPUs as you have in your system, but ONLY if they’re identical series (so two 580s would be fine). The one caveat is that it will only use the RAM from one card.

In terms of speed, I think that Octane is much faster than Cinema’s physical renderer, but it’s hard to compare directly because Octane uses different materials, lights, etc. The default “direct light” kernel is very fast but it’s not really GI because it doesn’t calculate bounces.

I suggest you try out the demo to see if you like it. There’s definitely a bit of a learning curve.