graphics card

[Max Lloyd]

How much does the graphics card influence rendering time?

[Scott Hopkins]

I have been told by the factory that your graphics card has very little influence on rendering times. CPU speed is everything when it comes to rendering. This goes for Maxwell Render too.

[Max Lloyd]

Thanks Scott.

And with regards to cpu, are dual processors supported now? Or are they likely to be in the near future?

Thanks.

Max

[Scott Hopkins]

Dual processors won't do anything for the current version of Revit. Perhaps in the future Revit may have some elements that will take advantage of duals, however this may be the distant future. Accurender, Viz and Maxwell all take advantage of dual processors.

If you do a lot of rendering dual processors will serve you well. If you don't do much rendering then duals (as far as Revit is concerned) is a waste of money.

[Max Lloyd]

Sorry to sound so silly, but when you say accurender is supported, do you mean within revit? I do a lot of rendering using accurender within revit, but very little outside of it. I do use sketchup for creating presentations (utilising revit models exported as dwgs) and find these to be very time consuming in terms of importing the dwg model into sketchup. Would dual processors help this?

Thanks for all your help.

Max.

[dg]

Although dual processors will not directly speed up Revit (or any other process that is not multi-threaded) they will allow more efficient multitasking so that if you are running a few programs at once, the whole machine will not slow down as each process tries to grab a bit of processor time.

So whilst there is no speed up, there is no slow down so may equal a nett gain!

[Scott Hopkins]

Sorry to sound so silly, but when you say accurender is supported, do you mean within revit?
Yes dual processors work within Revit's AccuRender.

[Max Lloyd]

Thanks everyone. Obvously just specifying a new machine and your advice has been greatly appreciated.