Rendering speed in Windows 7 64 & Revit 2010 64bit

[niro3000]

I recently got my workstation upgraded and up my ram to 8gb.

I have a single quad-core chip at 2.66mhz and with 8gb DDR2 ram, I thought I would see a great improvement in redering, but I am not sure sure if it did improve.

the system used to be running windows xp 32 & Revit 2009, and the model I rendered used to take about 11hrs. its got about 30 down lights, interior: artificial only, setting: high @ 150dpi. I know being at 150dpi, it would take 2.7x longer than at say 72dpi and since the upgrade I thought it would be much faster to render the same image. however its been running about 9.5 hours still 18% to go, see attached.

with the new setup I checked the task manager, all 4 core seemed to be running at 100%, however, its using only about 4gb of ram with the rest setting there not used, is this normal?

I am no tech head, so can any bench marker shed some light on if i can improve rendering performance?

[trombe]

Hi, I just did similar 2 months ago although only have a Core 2 Duo 2.67, 8Gb DDR 2 RAM, Vista 64. Revit x64.
After running a few through, Revit seems to only use about 1.5-1.6 Gb RAM while rendering using the Task Manager to read out data. I feel about the same as you although I really think that it is a bit faster and Revit generally seems to run smoother than on 32 bit and 4 Gb RAM. Crashing also seems to have stopped, which is, a good thing.

I am guessing its still cpu grunt that is the problem once you have 8Gb RAM and a quad in a x64 environment...its no slug with those specs and although the arch viz people have a wide range of hardware often with 16-24 Gb RAM and dual Xeon quads or render farms, but then they are using dedicated rendering software that is not crippled for shaders and tools let alone cpu cores , as is the case with mental ray inside Revit.
boo hoo,

trombe

[SCShell]

Hey there,
I can't speak on Windows 7 yet; however, my new machine runs XP64 with an I7 processor and 6 gigs of ram. It does render faster than my old machine....but, the biggest advantage that I see is that I can copy a project and start a rendering, Minimize it, open a new session of Revit, and continue working on the actual project while my rendering is being done in the background. When it's done, I just close that project and delete it.
I have done this with 2 renderings cooking in the background. A real time saver for me.
Hope that helps a bit.
Steve

[niro3000]

thanks for the responses guys, lets hope one day revit gets the techincal boost it needs and utilized the hardwarefully when rendering.

i would say, windows 7 rocks! i skipped vista in its entirety and went from xp 32 to win7 64, it really made multi tasking so much smoother.

SC, yes i have done multi-sessions many times, even rending 4 session on my old xp 32bit. perhaps i'll try it on this machine too and see if there are any obvious improvement.

[Jit]

hey guys

yep, I have done 1 rendering split with region render on same machine i7 extreme (2 sessions of revit) and yes it has cut the time in half. Once both sessions have finished, I join the images in photoshop.

that was done in xp64...still the best