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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: Jgone on March 07, 2017, 04:22:14 PM

Title: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Jgone on March 07, 2017, 04:22:14 PM
Hello there wise ones.

It's my time to upgrade my pc. My i5-2500k is causing me too much headache with terragen 4 because of super slow renders.

So i decided to go with this bundle that includes motherboard + cpu + memory :
Asus PRIME Z270-A + Intel 7700K + G.Skill 3200MHz DDR4 16GB kit

So my question is, i still have money to spend on my set. Would there be any reason to go for 32gb of ddr 4 ? Or is that just not worth the buck ?

Also as a bonus question: When my cpu arrives, is there a reason for me to doodle with "Maximum threads" or any other option to increase performance ?
(i'm not exactly tech savvy person so i'm not entirely sure what the Maximum threads part does).

Thanks for your time !  :)
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: KyL on March 07, 2017, 07:19:57 PM
I would definitely go for 32Gb. Depending on you scenes, 16Gb might be enough but having more is always going to be useful.
You could have a big ass texture opened in photoshop and check the result in Terragen right away, this kind of things.  ;)

You shouldn't have to bother with the maximum thread, unless you want to limit Terragen to use only part of you CPU and use the rest for other applications.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Jgone on March 08, 2017, 03:14:10 AM
Interesting. Would you say it has an effect  on the final renders rendering time ?
I mean i don't use photoshops and whatnots during the time i tweak my scenes. And when i render my scenes i often do it at night.  But i would be extremely intrigued if it actually did affect the final render times.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: bobbystahr on March 08, 2017, 05:22:37 PM
Quote from: Jgone on March 08, 2017, 03:14:10 AM
Interesting. Would you say it has an effect  on the final renders rendering time ?
I mean i don't use photoshops and whatnots during the time i tweak my scenes. And when i render my scenes i often do it at night.  But i would be extremely intrigued if it actually did affect the final render times.

I think cpu speed has the prime effect on render times...I could be wrong
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: KyL on March 08, 2017, 07:00:30 PM
I think the same, more memory isn't going to give you faster renders!
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Oshyan on March 08, 2017, 08:01:59 PM
More memory won't give you faster render times *except* in the case of a memory-constrained situation (i.e. you run out of memory and have to use virtual memory, which is much, much slower). 32GB of RAM is a good amount to have these days as TG4 uses more memory for v3 clouds and for render optimizations that improve render time (to be clear, having more memory does *not* make the render faster, but TG4 uses more memory to render the same scene in less time vs. TG3; it will use the same amount of memory on any machine you render on though).

I would also recommend considering one of the new AMD Ryzen CPUs. You can see here that even the cheaper Ryzen 1700 (not X) basically destroys the 7700k on multithreaded Cinebench, which is the closest to Terragen rendering as you're going to see in most benchmark tests:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-review-a-deep-dive-on-1800x-1700x-and-1700/18
If you're a gamer though, and want good performance for games and other less well-threaded applications than the 7700k could be more well-balanced for your needs since its clock speed is higher, even though it has half the number of cores.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Jgone on March 09, 2017, 02:40:16 AM
Thx for the replies all !

Quote from: Oshyan on March 08, 2017, 08:01:59 PM
More memory won't give you faster render times *except* in the case of a memory-constrained situation (i.e. you run out of memory and have to use virtual memory, which is much, much slower). 32GB of RAM is a good amount to have these days as TG4 uses more memory for v3 clouds and for render optimizations that improve render time (to be clear, having more memory does *not* make the render faster, but TG4 uses more memory to render the same scene in less time vs. TG3; it will use the same amount of memory on any machine you render on though).

I would also recommend considering one of the new AMD Ryzen CPUs. You can see here that even the cheaper Ryzen 1700 (not X) basically destroys the 7700k on multithreaded Cinebench, which is the closest to Terragen rendering as you're going to see in most benchmark tests:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-review-a-deep-dive-on-1800x-1700x-and-1700/18
If you're a gamer though, and want good performance for games and other less well-threaded applications than the 7700k could be more well-balanced for your needs since its clock speed is higher, even though it has half the number of cores.

- Oshyan



Thanks a ton for the help. I think ill wait for the parts to arrive and doodle a bit with some renders and see if i really could use 16gb more. I think i'm gonna be blown away with the upgrade even with 16gb of DDR4. My ye'olde i5-2500k didn't even have multithreading so.. the upgrade is quite enormous !

I actually gave AMDs Ryzen cpus a thought but i'm also going for the 1080ti gpu in the near future because of my gaming habits, so the i7-7700k seemed like a perfectly balanced option for me. Tho for purely rendering, i think the Ryzen will be the new favorite for terragen users for a while !
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: dpcole72 on March 11, 2017, 10:02:43 PM
Quote from: Oshyan on March 08, 2017, 08:01:59 PM
More memory won't give you faster render times *except* in the case of a memory-constrained situation (i.e. you run out of memory and have to use virtual memory, which is much, much slower). 32GB of RAM is a good amount to have these days as TG4 uses more memory for v3 clouds and for render optimizations that improve render time (to be clear, having more memory does *not* make the render faster, but TG4 uses more memory to render the same scene in less time vs. TG3; it will use the same amount of memory on any machine you render on though).

I would also recommend considering one of the new AMD Ryzen CPUs. You can see here that even the cheaper Ryzen 1700 (not X) basically destroys the 7700k on multithreaded Cinebench, which is the closest to Terragen rendering as you're going to see in most benchmark tests:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-review-a-deep-dive-on-1800x-1700x-and-1700/18
If you're a gamer though, and want good performance for games and other less well-threaded applications than the 7700k could be more well-balanced for your needs since its clock speed is higher, even though it has half the number of cores.

- Oshyan

Wowzers.  What you said is making me thiking of splurging on a fast data rate DDR4 set.  My desktop PC has 16GB DDR4 RAM and when I start a render I close every other application so Terragen has the maximum amount of RAM.  I hope this isn't hijacking but as I too upgraded to TG4, what you're saying is that it is optimized to make use of more RAM than before, for rendering clouds and clouds are my favorite thing to create. 

Would 16GB still be enough for a 4K static image with clouds with higher samples (I use 64 or 128) and maximum AA?  Would 32GB decrease rendering appreciably?  (I know a faster CPU is the most important component, but it sounds like RAM could be a factor in reducing rendering time to some margin.  )

Or would I be better off setting up my older Linux PC (which has 16GB DDR3 RAM) as a rendering node?

Thanks!
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Oshyan on March 12, 2017, 01:37:03 PM
As I said, having more (or faster) RAM won't really affect render times much, unless you are running into having too little memory. IF you are running into that situation you would know it. Assuming the application doesn't crash from running out of memory, what you get is extremely, extremely slow performance because it's having to use the hard drive/mass storage space as virtual memory, and this is much, much slower than your RAM.

As for how much RAM a particular scene requires, it really depends on a number of factors. If your scene just has clouds and no (or few) objects, then rendering at 4k even with a few v3 layers should be fine in 16GB of RAM. Your comment about number of samples (clouds don't have specific sample numbers anymore, maybe you're talking about the atmosphere?) is a cause for concern because those are very high levels for Terragen 4 (which comes with Defer Atmo enabled by default, which means fewer atmo samples are required), but higher samples should not require significantly higher RAM as far as I know.

So basically, 16GB should be OK for most purposes for now, but RAM is fairly cheap so upgrade to 32GB when you can if you're serious about really complex scenes with lots of v3 cloud layers as well as complex objects/populations.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Jgone on March 22, 2017, 08:32:22 AM
Didn't want to start a new thread. Apologies.

My question is, would an m.2 ssd drive improve Terragen 4 render times / usability in any meaningful way in comparison to a normal sata ssd ?
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Oshyan on March 23, 2017, 12:40:19 AM
No, an m.2 SSD should not improve rendering performance. It *might* improve asset loading times by some amount, but for many of those assets it is processing time or other factors rather than raw disk speed that limits things.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: jaf on June 14, 2017, 12:32:12 PM
Actually, when I just got back into Terragen after a years absence and a new rig, I thought I would big a scene using a bunch of very large populations.  I forgot one "little" detail -- I didn't check "Clip to camera."  So I started the render with the task manager running ( to monitor the amount of memory TG4 was using) and it peaked out at 83GB!  To my surprise, the render completed in a couple hours. Without a M.2 SSD, I probably would have killed the render.  So in that case, the M.2 helped.

Oshyan is correct though -- a M.2 or any other type of SSD is not worth the cost for Terragen.  But booting up in 10 seconds is nice and some other apps work better with it.     
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Dune on June 15, 2017, 02:18:55 AM
You have 'only' 64 gig, so how could it peak to 83? Would it have used virtual memory on the SSD?
And I don't actually know if clipping to cam would reduce memory use (much). I think it's negligable, correct me if I'm wrong.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: masonspappy on June 15, 2017, 03:49:20 AM
Quote from: Dune on June 15, 2017, 02:18:55 AM
You have 'only' 64 gig, so how could it peak to 83? Would it have used virtual memory on the SSD?
Interesting idea....if the memory requirements exceed available RAM, would a virtual file be built on the SSD?  If so, then perhaps an SSD's higher I/O capability just might decrease render time.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: archonforest on June 15, 2017, 04:01:34 AM
Go with 32Gb ram for sure. If you try to render something in high res plus if you pull up the details and AA settings then TG will need more ram. This is my experience. My pc often uses up to 24Gb while rendering finals due to the resolution and details.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: jaf on June 15, 2017, 09:40:42 AM
I purposely added massive populations to see how far I could "push" TG4 and my new build.  I built a scene with the camera at x=0 and z=0.  When I added the pops, I just but them at 0,0,0 so a majority would be out of camera view.  And yes, it used vm with the ssd.

I normally wouldn't be that sloppy, but this was just a combination of testing and me making the mistake of not clipping the pops from the camera.

I've been building my scenes lately around 0,y,0 and it seems to be quite efficient with my workflow.  First, I use World Machine to get the basic terrain.  Then, instead of moving the camera, I move the heightfield shader. I try to not rotate the camera in x and z, but sometimes I must.  I use macros in World Machine to rotate the terrain build so I can get close to the view I want before it gets to TG4.

Now I  put in the foreground pops at o,y, o with camera clipping.  If I want a dense grass pop out to 20m, I make it 40x40.  Background pops obviously need to be positioned either by x,z or altitude/slope, or some combination of those parameters.  Now instead of having to move the camera and all the populations, I can move the terrain and (usually) adjust the camera height.  Or swap in a new or rotated heightfield.

Okay, as far as 64 GB of memory.... I can set TG4 to 3/4 of my cores, start a render, and then run Lightwave/3D-Coat, or other apps.  So far TG4 has not crashed except when I pause a render (Matt mentioned this was a known problem.)

Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: zaxxon on June 15, 2017, 11:01:28 AM
Jaf, I'm also curious as to how you "peaked" out at 83 gigs of ram with 64 gigs installed? I currently have 64 gigs in my main TG render machine (HP Z800 dual zeon 5690 @3.47 mhz) and use some pretty 'dense' scenes that sometimes run up to the ram limit (63.7 out of 64 gigs utilized). All that happens is that the machine starts paging the HD and render times slow dramatically. I'm upgrading to 96 gigs due to the asset load in current projects becoming unwieldy and unstable. Some optimization strategies may be called for ya think... ;). Still 32 gigs should be fine, unless as Oshyan points out that the scene requirements put you at the limit, and yes V3 clouds with hundreds of millions of voxels are a beastly load on your system!
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Dune on June 15, 2017, 11:23:17 AM
If an ssd can be used for vm, great. It sure is fast, so swapping wouldn't perhaps really slow the machine down. Can you tell about that? Might be an interesting venue if you're at max memory possible (due to slots, or so).

I always plant my pop centers at half the distance of the pop size needed in front of the camera, and rotate like the camera rotation, so a maximum efficiency is secured.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: jaf on June 15, 2017, 02:03:59 PM
Zaxxon, easy.  Just load your default scene and add a population like "Gras_by_Klas" (gras.tgo) and set the object spacing to a crazy number like .01 and hit populate.

Here's what it looked like at 2% (I use Sysinternals Process Explorer since it will graph an individual process -- the scale will increase when it "hits" the top of the graph.)


Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: jaf on June 15, 2017, 02:20:55 PM
Quote from: Dune on June 15, 2017, 11:23:17 AM
If an ssd can be used for vm, great. It sure is fast, so swapping wouldn't perhaps really slow the machine down. Can you tell about that? Might be an interesting venue if you're at max memory possible (due to slots, or so).

I always plant my pop centers at half the distance of the pop size needed in front of the camera, and rotate like the camera rotation, so a maximum efficiency is secured.

I did a quick test and didn't see a difference in a centered at the camera 40x40 pop (with camera clipping) and a 20x20 positioned right in front of the camera.  I like my method because if I rotate the camera, my foreground population is still centered on the camera.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Dune on June 16, 2017, 02:08:28 AM
Good to know, jaf, thanks for checking. I think the populating mechanism must have changed over the years to be faster and more efficient. Still, I'd like to know if using an ssd for VM would be really fast and workable. Then you could even use a say 64 gig SSD and just 16 gig of memory banks for peaking to about 80 gig. Cool concept.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: jaf on June 16, 2017, 03:29:43 PM
I ran Performance Test 9 on my M.2 SSD and got a score of 15284.  Then on my Western Digital a 726, so the SSD was 21 time faster.  What this would mean time-wise with a TG4 render, I'm not sure.  I guess I can rig up a scene that would use more than 64GB and render it.  Then switch my virtual memory drive and re-render.

I'll give that some thought and see what I can do.

[edit]  Just a thought ..... I wonder if there's a way to use GPU memory?  I've got 11 GB of DDR5 memory "sitting" there basically doing nothing.
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Oshyan on June 16, 2017, 03:48:20 PM
SSDs are getting very fast but are still much slower than RAM. So if you can avoid swapping to disk (SSD included) it is best to do so.

I think I've heard of weird hacks for using GPU memory as RAM, but remember that the connection from CPU to GPU is not as wide as that from CPU to main memory (especially in quad channel setups), so it is not going to be as fast as main RAM still. With memory being relatively cheap, the only limiting factor these days is the number of slots on your motherboard. For new machine builds/purchases there's not much good reason not to get a board capable of handling at least 128GB of RAM, even if you only start out with 32 or 64GB.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: jaf on June 16, 2017, 06:43:15 PM
Yes, I agree.  I've only gone over 32 GB when I've made a mistake anyway, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could at least get an approximate render time savings between a M.2 SSD and a HD. But..........

Now I'm stumped.  I tried the default scene with a single population, again using 1000x1000 area "Gras by Klas" tgo, with a small (.05) object separation. But after it populated and did the set-up and inserting,  I watched the memory TG4 used (64 GB+) continue to climb and the render not starting.  It just kept going -- no error message.  It finally hit 100 GB and I killed the process.   So I'm wondering if there's a limit on instances of a single object?  Or the area the object could be too small to contain the number of instances?

So I tried again except I used changed to .1 separation.  This one rendered.  I added a second population, identical to the first but in a different area of the scene.  Both populated, did the set-up, but the render never started and the memory went from 32 GB+ to 100 GB -- kind of ratcheting up .3 or .4 and down .1 or .2, but always climbing higher.  Clicking the "X" on the render window didn't abort and TG4 gave a "not responding", so again I had to kill the process.

I'm at loss on what to try next.  I wish I would have kept that scene that used 83 GB and successfully rendered.  I'm pretty sure I had a bunch of populations -- probably 15 with large areas but not as condensed as my test today.   

Maybe trying the command line will help narrow this down?

Title: Re: Importance of the amount of DDR4 in TG4.
Post by: Dune on June 17, 2017, 03:15:41 AM
Thanks for these comprehensive replies. At least it's good to know SSD VM can be helpful if memory requirements surpass the banks a bit, despite rendertime.