iRay or Mental Ray

[tgarrett]

Hello, I am currently in the process of ordering a new workstation and the what I am trying to decide on is if I should order multiple CPU for mental ray rendering or should I order multiple GPU for iRay rendering? Is mental ray (CPU rendering) still the best way to render or is iray (GPU rendering) the way I should go. I have only used mental ray and have no experience with iray.

iray spec: CPU- (1) Xeon E5-2630 v2 six core 2.6 GHz
Graphics- (2) Nvidia GTX 780ti cards

menta ray sped: CPU- (2) Xeon E5-2630 v2 six core 2.6 GHz
Graphics- (1) Nvidia GTX 780ti card

I use Autocad Architecture for most of my work, but when I do render in 3DS max design, I want quick render times.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Maciej Wypych]

Hi,
Iray is still missing some features, you'll be fine to use it for small scenes for quick previews. Stick with mental ray for production.

The problem with using Iray is the graphics card memory limit per card.
If you are going to be using 2xGTX cards your scene render will be limited to whatever memory you'll have on 1 card, unfortunately available memory doesn't add up if you have more cards.
So for example if you'll have 2xGTX 3GB your render will only be able to use 3GB (actually a bit less, because windows will take a bit of that)
Only way around at the moment is to invest in a quaddro card with a lot of GPU RAM - and these are very expensive.
NVIDIA announced that it will have a unified memory feature in their cards, which will share GPU and CPU memory (and get rid of the above issue) but that's set to go into market in 2016, so a long wait.

I'd invest into more CPU cores and a lot of ram at the moment.

Hope that helps,

Maciej

[rbcameron1]

iRay for Max 2016 still has some material errors. It sometimes can't see my 3D tree's leaves because they have transparent TIFF backgrounds, so the whole thing comes out white.
Other than that, speed and accuracy are both there. I will use iRay to get the "base" render down and then if and when I have time I use Mental Ray for the "final" rendering I use. Many examples in the link below my signature. Cheers!