***First Impression*** KeyShot 6 is FAST!

Started by MisterNeil, January 12, 2016, 07:34:35 AM

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MisterNeil

Hello,

I finally got KeyShot 6.0.266 for the Mac installed and I am thrilled to report that it's at least 200% faster than version 5 when rendering.

I just tested version 6 with a previous HD animation (1 minute long) that took 9 days to render using version 5. With version 6, a single frame rendered at 15 minutes and 36 seconds. However, with version 5 the same frame rendered in over 35 minutes.

This is great news.

I will continue my KeyShot 6 testing and will report any other speed improvements as I discover them. For now, this user is one happy camper. Thank you!

Best regards,

Neil

Computer Specs:

Mac Pro (Late 2013)
OS X Yosemite 10.10.5
Ram: 16 GB
Processor: 3.5 GHZ 6-Core Intel Xeon E5

Speedster

Hey, Neil;
Guess what!  KeyShot 6.1, which a few of us are beta testing, is WAY faster than KeyShot 6.0!
Bill G

MisterNeil

#2
Noooooooo! Really? Wow. I look forward to using 6.1 when it becomes final :)

BTW, another reason for my enthusiasm with using a faster KeyShot is because my department has been in talks in getting a dedicated BOXX workstation for rendering. If I can cut animation rendering times by 50% with ver 6, from 9 days to 4.5 days without buying $10-15k hardware, I'm ok. Personally, I want the BOXX, but management can only make that decision.

Bill, can you confirm if 6.1 is for bug fixes or does it introduce new features that didn't make it in 6.0? Thanks!

Neil

Speedster

Some neat new features, but mainly tests are for stability and some fixes, as I understand it.  A lot of work is being done with the plug-ins, for example.

I'm running 32 cores on my BOXX machine, and I'm a very happy camper.  But I'm still planning on adding a BOXX RenderPro with an additional 28 cores, or 56 hyper threaded.  But the network license adds too much to the overall investment for me at this time.  I always let sales and demand drive my decisions, and I'm not quite there yet.

Bill G

MisterNeil

I heard there were plans for a C4D plugin for a future version of KeyShot. That would be exciting if true.

Your current hardware setup sounds like it's a scream machine. Great.

My 6-core MacPro is slooooooow when rendering, but version 6 has made me smile again. Can't wait to perform more testing for speed and features.

theAVator

#5
I was going to be a Debbie Downer and say that I've had the exact opposite experience... until today it seemed as if everything I rendered took forever. I'd queue up like 6 images in KS5 and render them out. Within 20min everything rendered out and I had pretty good results. I render the same 6 images in KS6, with the same quality settings and they would take almost an hour per image and most times the render queue would run out of memory and crash the program (whole system a couple times).  >:(

THEN, I went through the preferences (Edit-Preferences-Advanced tab) and found the "Render output window memory limit" setting which was set to 256MB. I jacked that up to 1024, and now the program is cruising along rendering images(with double the quality settings as previous tries) and even just adding images to the queue take 1/4 of the time it previously took.

Seemed like I flipped a magic switch. Does that sound right?? Should that 1 setting really affect the rendering speed that much? And if so, why would the default value be so low?
I would agree with your statements, now that everything is blazing along. But maybe a cautionary tale, if its acting slow - check out those preference settings.  ;D

MisterNeil

Thank you theAVator for mentioning this preference setting.

You bring up a valid point. I think everyone should consider doing a test to see the speed difference between 256, 512, and 1024 for "Render output window memory limit."

I may have found the sweet spot for me when rendering. I normally use 512 and did a test for 1024. When doing so, the same animation frame still took 15:36 mins. to complete. However, when I brought this setting down to 256, the rendering time was actually 24 seconds slower. Final time was 16 mins. I'll keep the setting to 512 for now.

Question to Luxion:
If the "Render output window memory limit" setting affects the rendering speed, why is the default setting set to 256???

Looking forward to a response. Thanks!

Neil


soren

We have been investigating the issue you have reported regarding the slowdown in relation to the "Output window memory limit" setting and we have not been unable to reproduce.

Can you provide some additional details to help as track down the problem:
- Operating system (Mac/Windows) and version
- Which resolution are you rendering images at? The memory limit of 256 MB should not have any effect unless you are rendering an image larger than 16 megapixels (e.g. 4096 x 4096)
- Which graphics card are you using? How much memory does it have?
- Do the images you are rendering have bloom or vignetting enabled?
- Are you using max samples/time or the advanced rendering mode?

Thank you for your feedback,
Søren