My company is investing on new machines to optimize our workflow and I was wondering what should we consider if we need to make renders faster using Cinema 4D + Arnold in a Mac platform. I completely understand PC maybe would be a great option but all our environment is build on top Apple and adding PCs to it is out of question. Should we get computers with lots of cores and RAM. How different it would be rendering something in a 8, 12 or 16 core machine? Any feedback is more than welcome. Thanks!
Arnold tends to scale very well with number of cores. So 16-cores at 3GHz each can be almost twice as fast as 8-cores at 3GHz. Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, and clock speeds can move around based on how many cores are active, but generally more cores mean faster renders.
As for amount of RAM, this will depend on what you are rendering. More RAM will let you render more complex scenes and/or have more AOVs.
The more cores the better. Arnold scales almost linearly with the number of cores.
For RAM, it depends on what type of work you do (eg how big are your scenes?). Too little RAM will be a killer.
Any updates on GPU Metal guys? In may experience Arnold has pretty good RAM management, I would not overspend there, guessing you are buying Mac Pros I would buy least RAM from Apple and upgrade according to needs.
Thanks Stephen.
Sometimes we need to render big images. Most of the work are stills realistic images of products.
Thanks Thiago.
The scenes are quite complex and oversized, with lots of transparencies and SSS. So I guess I will need boost up the RAM. Maybe follow Daniel's reco and add it as necessary.
Transparency and SSS don't use extra memory, so you're ok there. By complex I meant lots of triangles, volumes, points, etc.