Whats the best computer upgrade for C4D?

[Brian Jones]

in a single machine render speed is generally more cores/threads and higher Ghz of the cores – the more cores on a chip the slower they run usually (too much heat with a lot of cores packed in a small space) so it’s a balancing game. And editor speed is a combo of graphics card and single core speed so the editor is best with the fastest core possible (which is usually only 4 cores) and the renderer is fastest with more cores. C4D can handle a lot of cores but if you are staying in a laptop format you are limited by what you can get in a laptop.
Ram is not much of a factor as long as you have enough, 8 isn’t tons but it’s not too bad if you are not building huge/complex scenes or using huge textures

[Dan Dikemann]

Thanks for your reply. What do you recommendi should upgrade? Like what should I do to render quicker?

[Brian Jones]

if you can upgrade the CPU on your laptop that’s the way to go (I don’t know if that can be done with a Dell Inspiron) or get another computer and use Team Render to render on both or get a new faster computer. Or try Octane render (or similar that uses the graphics card to render, you have to have a Cuda capable fast graphics card – but I know nothing about GPU rendering other than it exists.

[Brandon Ludford]

Like the guy above said, the CPU is the best way to go for fast renders.

However the quality will remain the same, for more render quality, I would recommend upgrading your Graphics Card, it will give a subtle increase to render times, but it will also handle Anti-Aliasing really well, so you can bump up the AA level and not take a hit in render times whilst also getting really nice smooth edges.

But for fast renders, purely just upgrade your CPU, to an i7 is recommended, it has 8 Cores. you cant get any better than that.

[Brad Bussé]

Hmm, so is AA always offloaded to the GPU instead of CPU, even with physical render?

I have an 8-core nMP w/ dual d700 GPUs and I’d like to utilize the GPU power for rendering. What GPU-based render software is available that can work with ATI cards on a Mac with C4D r16, utilize multiple GPUs, and retain good quality renders w/ GI, etc?

I have access to multiple PCs for Team Render, but it seems to have issues with retaining connection to the clients after the initial setup.