Hardware discussion

[HHCR]

Greetings everyone, I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum to post this, please delete/move if that is the case! I personally am very new to the world of fractal generation, honestly I was unaware of the multitude of software out there until a client of mine brought up his slow render times. I work for a company that builds high end custom PC setups, and a client approached me regarding slow render time while using mandelbulb 3D the current specs of the system are:

Intel i5 quadcore
6GB DDR3
2x500GB HD's in RAID1
nVidia GTX 560

We're looking to reduce render times as much as possible, what would you folks recommend? Are there specific graphics cards that the community has had the best luck with? How do CUDA cores come into play? Consumer graphics are workstation (FireGL, Quadro, etc?) Is mandelbulb 3d multithreaded? Can it support multiple GPUs? Are there issues with data I/O? Would we benefit from adding an SSD scratch disk?

I haven't been able to find much in the way of hardware or answers to the above questions so anything you may have or can recommend is helpful!

Thanks!

[taurus]

there's only one component that is worth upgrading: the cpu
mandelbulb 3d is a pure cpu renderer. except depth of field effect, m3d uses all cpu cores available.

m3d is 32bit so ram is more than enough
m3d doesn't use gpgpu code so the graphics device is irrelevant
an ssd might speed up program start, but this is irrelevant too

if you want to use the existing system, I'd replace the i5 with an i7 - the bigger the better. 6core would work nice as m3d uses all cores.
if you want to build up a new one, I'd think of a dual xeon system...

[Dinkydau]

Yes, dual CPU is the way to go if you want the best performance.

[Sockratease]

there's only one component that is worth upgrading: the cpu
mandelbulb 3d is a pure cpu renderer. except depth of field effect, m3d uses all cpu cores available.

If you upgrade to many cores and use them all at 100% for a long time, it would be wise to invest in the best cooling system you can get as well.  It wont speed anything up, but it can prevent unexpected stops due to overheating and save time lost to replacing melted components!

[HHCR]

Not was I was hoping to hear, but such is life. Thanks everyone for the prompt response. Looks like perhaps an i7 or a Xeon is in the near future.

Thanks again!

[hobold]

One final word to confuse you more. :-)

A multiprocessor workstation would give you the most processor cores within a single box. But Xeon brand CPUs are expensive, even more so when they are actually multiprocessor capable. If the projected work is somewhat parallelizable on a coarse scale, i.e. when it can be partitioned into several independent rendering tasks, it might be more cost effective to buy several consumer grade Core i5 boxes for the same total sum. The user would simply move from one computer to the next after they have started a long running render job.

[hsmyers]

While the I7 (more chips and cores the merrier!) is a very good recommendation, I've had success with the AMD FX-6300 Six Core chip and 32gig of memory. That combined with a Radeon HD7700 has provided me with reasonable render times. Obviously the traditional programmers answer of 'More CPU, More GPU, More Memory' clearly applies to fractals---let the 'force' of your budget guide you 

--hsm

[Buddhi]

I think now is also good to invest on good graphics card. Mandelbulb 3D is not only one application for rendering fractals. There are also some other with use GPUs for rendering (like Fragmentarium and also Mandelbulber in quite near future). GPU is a future for rendering. About amount of memory. If you want to render very big images with some 64-bit applications (like Linux version of Mandelbulber) will be also nice to have minimum 8GB of RAM. I think 32 GB is too much. You will not utilize it. 8GB is enough to render 16000x12000 images.
So my recomendation is:
- CPU with minimum four cores or even six cores (most of fractal applications uses all available cores/CPUs)
- 8GB RAM
- Radeon HD 7800 (AMD has better support for OpenCL than nVidia - I don't know fractal application which uses CUDA).