why so slow?

[homerjward]

i dont get it. my system can play doom 3 or battlefield 2 at 50+fps at 1280x1024, 4x aa, all settings boosted, etc. but i've been rendering this seemingly simple, 525 frame lightwave scene with 3-pass aa for going on 6 days and i'm on frame 388. why is this? the last 30-40 frames have been 25 min/frame how is it that games can be so fast when lightwave is so slow...

 

[Coheebuzz]

Only realtime renderers used in games utilise the GPU. Rendering to a file from a 3D app uses the CPU. What Mac do you have?

 

[homerjward]

Only realtime renderers used in games utilise the GPU. Rendering to a file from a 3D app uses the CPU. What Mac do you have?

currently "between macs." i have an athlon 64 system with an x800. why doesn't rendering in lightwave use the gpu? wouldn't it be immensely faster?

 

[Eric5h5]

currently "between macs." i have an athlon 64 system with an x800. why doesn't rendering in lightwave use the gpu? wouldn't it be immensely faster?

Not in the least. GPUs are just designed to move polygons in games as fast as possible. Nothing at all to do with true 3D rendering, which is as CPU-intensive as it gets. The only thing GPUs are used for in 3D rendering is for fast previews. They're not capable of the sort of calculations necessary for all the fancy stuff.

--Eric

 

[kalross]

http://apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/5F125BA4653309A3CA25705A0005AD27

 

[ATD]

As others pointed out, it's different. Games for the most part are pre-rendered, it is also known as baking. All the hard stuff is pre-rendered, what you are looking at are pre-rendered textures reapplied to the polys. Bumps, shadows, specular, AA ... are baked in. You might find some sections in your Lightwave manuals about it.

 

[ATD]

currently "between macs." i have an athlon 64 system with an x800. why doesn't rendering in lightwave use the gpu? wouldn't it be immensely faster?

GPUs can do renders, it's called hardware rendering. I'm not sure about Lightware but in Maya it's used for rendering particle effects. I don't believe it's any faster than software renders. Again games don't really render the way the 3D program renders, I don't even know if you can call that rendering. A hardware render can only render to your screen size and if you open a window on top of the render it will get enbedded.

Here's a link to a box that does nothing but hardware renders and it's fast

http://www.artvps.com/page/16/renderdrive.htm

but it has a price to match. I have not priced one lately but believe this puppy goes for $14,500 USD.