Where is the bottleneck?

Where is the bottleneck?

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By Jfrog - 8 Years Ago

Hello to all,

First post here so I hope I am posting at the right place. Please let me no if I am not. :)

I 've been reading this forum for the last two weeks. It looks like a nice community with very nice people.

I plan to purchase Iclone 6 for VR storytelling. I come from a mac world and I want to buy a decent PC computer. I already have the GTX 1080 in mind along with 32 gig ram, I7, 6800k processor but I was wondering where would be the bottleneck?

For example, I was planning to buy a m.2 samsung 960 ssd. It is really fast but would it be too fast for nothing if the CPU rendering time can't catch up with the write speed of the disk. Would it be better to just have normal cheaper SSD drive?

Another question if you allow me. Does Iclone use any kind of disk cache? If so, buying extra ram would be more beneficial isn't?

What would be the maximum length for a 360 VR short video within Iclone?

Thank you in advance.

By justaviking - 8 Years Ago

Greetings. :)

Those look like great specs.

What size is that SSD? 512MB is good, but add a good old-fashioned HDD for mass storage (3TB drives are very affordable).

I don't know for sure about your VR question, but at least 10 minutes I expect. (General advice is to avoid really long projects. It is best to break them into smaller pieces for several reasons.) I don't know if VR 360 has any length restrictions, but someone else probably will.

Looking forward to you joining the community so we can see what you do with iClone.

By rgreenidge - 8 Years Ago

Hello Admin welcome to the club. I probably changed my motherboards and components every year, when Cyrix and AMD gave my more for the money I switched from Intel processors I would say from the early 1990's. I built computers for friends and family and gave them my hand me downs. In the beginning I would say I based my computer performances on the MS Flight Simulator. Then came the video burning to CD's, then DVD's to Blu~Rays, I could never keep up, and I used and tried just about every video software program. With this experience, you learn that rendering is not a open and shut case with iClone or making videos. The rendering time If you use the same settings on projects will vary with each frame depending complexity of what is being shown in that scene, or that camera at that particular time. Simple stationary backgrounds will decrease the rendering time. Doubling or tripling the money you spend, may not double or triple the rendering speed. I had the the top of the line AMD 8 core processor (not that 5000 watt power eater), and maxed my memory out to 32 GB, 4 slots x 8 GB. I went from a 2 GB video card, to a 8 GB video card and the only difference I saw was that I can pan my sets without stuttering. I do not use NVidia cards so I can't tell you if it makes a difference with the rendering. Most people on here will tell you to get a 1080 card, and tell you it's more important than the memory but they don't give examples. I have shown on here what I could do with 64 GB of MB RAM, compared to 96 GB of RAM, with me switching back to Intel. And I'm not one of those AMD vs Intel people, but I'm not going to waste $1000 for 15 minutes of improvement. After seeing the difference with 96 GB of RAM, and showing on here that's it's not a overkill I filled all 8 memory slots up and have 128 GB of RAM now. I still have the same problems with random crashes with iClone, that I had with the AMD systems. You're going to need lots of space if you have a lot of projects. I have one drive for iClone, and another for my videos before I edit them. SSD drives still scare me, and until you actually see someone on here showing you the difference where he used a mechanical drive vs a SSD don't go for the hype. Now if you only have one computer, and need to get online, that may be a problem. I split my projects into 3000 frames using PNG sequential files, and if it crashes, I start back where it crashed. Now if someone come on here and tells me he has a SSD hard drive and his iClone never crashes, then maybe I'd try one. If you can look at You Tube videos of iClone and cant tell what video card is being used by looking at it, is it worth spending 1080 money? Get the RAM, and a motherboard with 8 memory slots. Is there anyone on here that had a 980 card and upgraded to a 1080, and has seen a different result that is worth the money? Maybe with NVidia cards, but show me, I'm from Missouri and only have used AMD cards with iClone, and when I was told be people on here to get a card with more memory, it didn't change a thing, the bug was in the item I bought and I found that on my own. If you have projects with less than 10 avatars, you wont need much RAM. Working as a electronic engineer, you always get people telling you what they heard or believe. I always practiced what I preached not by hearsay or that it sounds good, or someone else said so, I put in the time and compare results hands on. I'm not going to tell you spending more money will do this if I haven't tried it myself. What's the point if a 1080 card can do this, and the others cant? The only people who can see this shading is those with 1080 cards, then the majority can't see it, and it may look crappy to them. It's like me trying to make a mix a song with a 40" woofer, and expect those to hear what I heard. Again until I see different, RAM over video card. Hard drive capacity over SSD speed. That's my 5 cents, but it comes with proof that I posted on You Tube. The only problem I had on this forum, is when I ask people specific technical questions of how they came to this conclusion they don't answer. I'm not here to challenge anyone, I don't like wasting my time and money or believe it is right to tell someone to do something that you are not a expert in, but go by hearsay.

By animagic - 8 Years Ago

@rgreenidge: I for one do not base my technical comments on hearsay but based on experience of building and using quite a number of systems. So I don't really understand your comment. This is not a systems builders' forum, so when people come for advice it's best to keep it concise and to the point.

By planetstardragon - 8 Years Ago

if you understand the functions of the components, you'll be able to know where to strengthen your system for your needs

1 - the Video card processor - handles, the textures, the real time pixel processing, and the output rendering, and the physx

2 - the cpu - handles compression / decompression - so for opening files, rendering video and converting to mp4, and many 3rd party systems use the cpu for rendering as well, such as modeling software, blender, maya, modo - it's mainly the real time technology which evolved from gaming, that moved on to placing more emphasis on gpu processing since it's inherently a faster processor than the cpu.

3 - the ram, which loads your software, - more often than not you will find yourself with a browser open, iclone, 3dxchange, a modeling software and possibly a video editor at the same time....some video modelers such as 3D coat use computer ram over gpu ram. 8 gig vram just started going mainstream, and was too expensive for the general public so most older softwares tuned their software to be easy on the video card demands. gpu rendering is still a relatively new technology that not everyone uses, so you still need power on the cpu side for software that are cpu dependant.

4 - Drive - matters for the system cache, opening and saving files. Using SSD for everything has diminishing returns - and the life expectancy of your drives are shorter. I'd use a bit of both standard hard drives and an SSD in the mix - so it's cost effective, and set up your SSD to be easily replaced - for example, use it for cache to directly impact system speed where it matters most - but for data storage, such as projects and assets use the standard disc drives since you can get those in 5 gigs and up for much more affordable prices than ssd. They are still fast, just go NAS type drives with most cache and rpms. The cost difference between a 5 gig disc drive vs 5gigs of ssd isn't justifiable for a millisecond or a even a 3 second difference.

5 - motherboard - handles how fast the data is distributed in your system. if it is not made to withstand heat, it will throttle the speed to a crawl.

6 - cooling system - matters bigly - the hotter any part of your system performs the slower it will perform. so you can have bells and whistles, and i can have an average system, if my system is cooler than yours, we will have roughly the same performance speed because iclone and real time rendering generates a ton of heat in it's processing demands.

7 - powersupply - when you are rendering with iclone - you are causing all parts of your system to run at max at the same time, biggest energy draw / spike in the process - if your power supply is weak, your individual parts will slack in performance. it's always good to have wattage over minimum requirements - should you ever decide to get into overclocking your system to increase your frame rate for complex scenes.

Hope this helps.

By justaviking - 8 Years Ago

@rgreenidge,

I promote SSD for these reasons:
a) Fast
b) Reliable
c) Fast

In an otherwise decent system, you can actually FEEL the improvement by going from HDD to SSD. It boots a lot faster, applications launch faster, game levels open faster.

Some people worry because they've heard that SSDs can "wear out." If that's a concern, it shouldn't be. I can find some articles that explain it. But even for very heave workloads at home, it's simply not an issue. Seriously, not an issue. A good SSD is statistically less likely to fail that a good HDD. Of course, you should always have a backup for many reasons; system failure, undesirable software updates, viruses, ransomware, lightning strikes, etc.

I doubt, though, you'd notice much if any difference on rendering times. Writing to the disk is probably not much of a bottleneck when doing iClone rendering. Maybe you could measure a difference with a stop watch, but I doubt you'd notice the difference like you will for boot and launch times. I output my renders to a large HDD anyway, so it's not a factor in that case.

Going from an HDD to a SDD is almost like going from one to two monitors. You won't want to go back.

By RobertoColombo - 8 Years Ago

My experience so far is 2 years with SSD (Samsung EVO 850), 500GB, no issues at all.
Obviously I use the SSD only for SW and, as much as I can, I avoid to create temporary and download files there.
Unfortunately not every SW allows to setup the temporary directory path, so something still goes run-time into the SSD, but that's quite a small quantity.
I also do NOT use the SSD to store data files that are subject to be updated quite often (and in future I might consider to add a new SSD for data files not being updated often).

Now some technical considerations (I know a bit on non-volatile memories, as I worked on them for more than 10 years...).
SSD technology was first used in military and industrial segment, where the operating conditions are way more severe than what you have at home: the technology to make them working in a reliable way does exists.... since long... question is what the company producing them does in terms of "memory qualification" when the device becomes a commodity.
This can scare people, but....
Consider that there are different SSD types, based on different non-volatile memory technologies.
My SSD, Samsung EVO, is based on Flash multi-level cell, which should be the "weakest", but in reality, as I said, it still work very well after 2 years (and I had iClone rendering sessions up to 14 days continuous... just to tell that the PC is not there to collect dust... :)).
Samsung Pro SSD are based on single level cell, so they are intrinsically more robust and probably even faster in writing (Single Level Cell can be programmed faster than Multi Level Cell).
Again, I am happy with my MLC-based EVO, but if you are really scared and want to sleep quietly, then go for a Samsung Pro.
Now there is a new technology called Vertical Nand, which makes it possible a higher integration scale.
I believe it is well tested, but if I had to buy a SSD now, I would stay on the previous generation technology...

Consider that, whatever the technology being used, the memory controller embedded into the SSD implements several algorithm aimed to increase the write reliability and protect from read faults.
For the write reliability, sophisticated wear levelling algorithms spread the data being written uniformly across the memory, so that even if the same file is being written multiple times, in reality it is stored in different parts of the memory (otherwise some parts of the memory would get too much stressed compared to other ones).
For the read reliability, even more sophisticated error correction algorithms are able to repair and rebuild teh correct data even in the presence of failed cells that reads 1 instead of 0 or vice verse.
Finally if some part of the SSD does not work in read or write, it is permanently marked as a "Bad Block" and removed from the available memory.
Some algorithms substitute them with a pool of fresh, never used blocks, so that the overall memory capacity is kept constant. Other algorithm instead decreases the SSD capacity.
Also, some critical tables are stored twice, so that if one get corrupted, the other one is read.
Last but not least: neither mechanical parts nor magnetism... can you imagine what does it mean to apply a magnetic polarization to a micro-metric part of a HDD memory and move a mechanical part to read the area around it. I sleep better if my SW is stored on a Flash-based SSD ;)

Finally, some open questions.
I am thinking to add a 2nd SSD, where to store the temporary files, but also the working files of teh projects I am currently working on.
Hence, it does not need to be so big, probably even 250GB is enough.
A big iClone project should be loaded quickly... is that true ? Anybody has any experience on that ?
Also, if iClone creates temporary files and uses them during the editing, maybe a SSD could help to speed up.
Anybody has such an experience ?

Cheers

Roberto

By Jfrog - 8 Years Ago

Thank you very much to all of you for taking the time to give your very valuable inputs. It is appreciated.

I have been using Samsung SSDs on Macs for the last three years and it made a huge difference specially, for boot up time, and working with very large video files (sequential reads and writes). Very large for me means 60 to 80 gig video files.

For example with my previous sata2 HD drives my reading / writing speed was around 80 MB/s. Switching to SSD brought my reading / writing between 450 to 500 MB/s. Now the new M.2 samsung 960 1TB, have sequential reads close to 3200 MB/s and sequential writes around 2000MB/s which is amazingly fast. I read that the new M.2 samsung 960 1TB is not as good with 4k files speed (small files like system files), so my idea was to have a normal samsung SSD drive as the system drive but to export all my session files and content to this faster drives. Then do all backups on normal 2 or 3 TB drives, because we always need backup wright? :)

But reading all you precious inputs makes me realize that maybe an M.2 SSD is overkill for Iclone since the bottleneck would probably be the CPU time to render anyway and not the time to write to disk. Curiously, I don't mind saving money... ;) and it will allow me to buy more RAM if needed.

Thanks again!

By Rampa - 8 Years Ago

It's the GPU, not the CPU, where you need to have the power.

The graphics card is where the rendering happens, even the "final render". A fairly basic CPU, like an i5 is actually plenty. I would suggest an Nvidia GTX 1060/6 gig as minimum. If you bump up to a GTX 1070, you get 8 gig of VRAM. The more VRAM the better. VRAM is not expandable, as it is soldered on the GPU.

System RAM should be, at least, 8 gig. Sixteen is a good idea.

You are correct that an SSD will not benefit iClone's functionality.

By animagic - 8 Years Ago

RobertoColombo (2/19/2017)

Finally, some open questions.
I am thinking to add a 2nd SSD, where to store the temporary files, but also the working files of teh projects I am currently working on.
Hence, it does not need to be so big, probably even 250GB is enough.
A big iClone project should be loaded quickly... is that true ? Anybody has any experience on that ?
Also, if iClone creates temporary files and uses them during the editing, maybe a SSD could help to speed up.
Anybody has such an experience ?

I have a 1TB SSD as data disk. I use it to store iClone content, including projects, as well as data for other programs, hence the larger size. As to projects loading faster, I haven't really noticed that. iClone seems to do a fair amount of pre-processing, so that's seems to be the bottleneck.

By RobertoColombo - 8 Years Ago

animagic (2/21/2017)

Thanks Job.

Roberto

By Jfrog - 8 Years Ago

No speed improvement is really strange. I am looking at a whole bunch of tutorials and every time something is loaded it takes a few seconds to happen, my guess was that an ssd would load at least 4 to 5 times faster. So instead of waiting 5 secondes, it should take 1 second. Saving a few seconds doesn't seem that much but at the end of the day you might have save an half hour of waiting.

I just bought Iclone and Crazytalk 8 yesterday but I haven't found the time to buy my PC yet. I hope to do it in the next 2 weeks after I finish a project. I will definitely invest in a small 250 GiG SSD for the system drive but I might wait a bit before investing in a SSD for storing the content and projects.

Thank you again.

By rgreenidge - 8 Years Ago

Okay this is what I was looking for a later CPU vs GPU. Not before they had 1080 cards or 2016 reviews. I agree with this, all components are important. But as I asked Rampa where did he come to this conclusion, he never says where or why? I stated on here I changed plenty of video cards, CPU's but only the CPU's have shown me a major difference when I render the same project using different components. I'm not here to argue or debate, show me where I can get this info? If you have a system that doesn't crash with iC6, please let me know? I only on this forum because iClone has crashed more than any video editing software I ever had. At least the restore function is almost 100%. I will buy a 1080 card if someone comes on here and tells me iClone has NEVER crashed when they had this card. I don't mind the crashing when working on a project I can restore in 2 minutes. It's the random crashing of the exact same project rendering that irks me. Whether it's 20 hours to finish the render, or 2 hours, I want it to complete every time. I tried just everything possible, but nothing seems to work. These testers probably have more experience, definitely more than I and the majority here, if not everyone, most say the CPU is more important when it comes to rendering. Now if iClone is different, please show me where that can be found? Here is the link. Don't kill the messenger... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQGlm5-QAWY Now where is the info that states the GPU is the most important, I really want to know so we can put a end to this, maybe?

By Rampa - 8 Years Ago

Here you go. :)
https://www.reallusion.com/iclone/installation-guide.html

By animagic - 8 Years Ago

I didn't keep a log, but all I can say that iClone 6 crashes rarely for me. This a both for an older system with 16 GB RAM and a GTX 980, and for my latest system with a 32 GB RAM and a GTX 1080. Sometimes in a session, it will crash repeatedly, after which I reboot and get my stability back. But it is very rarely that that happens to me. So I don't have the experience of some, where crashes are common. Some projects will always crash, unless I load another project first. This has happened with certain IC5 projects that I converted.

But I don't think my testimony will be that meaningful, because it really depends on the projects. CC avatars with high-resolution textures will be demanding. Everything that doesn't fit in VRAM will use RAM as an overflow. From what I understand that is what you are experiencing. Your projects need more VRAM than is available, so at that point additional RAM is beneficial. However, using two memory systems requires additional communication between the systems for coordination purposes, which gives you overhead and possibly inefficiency. It's like the old days when RAM was limited and swap space was used to provided additional storage space.

In addition to the overflow RAM that I mentioned, iClone itself also requires RAM for the project. So there is the part for visualization and then the data structure that holds the project. I'm not on the RL developer staff, so anything I come up with is pure speculation. But I believe textures required for preview are stored in RAM, which is obvious when you change the preview image size to a low value, such as 512x512. The RAM usage should go down (at least, it used to work that way).

Each of us have different requirements, so all we can do is share our experiences. I don't think it is possible to provide a final definite answer.

By Kevin.S - 8 Years Ago

Yap

By Rampa - 8 Years Ago

I don't think any of us know why your system runs poorly, RG. The specs certainly are not to low! There seem to be a few systems that people have that just do not work well with iClone. Others with the same specs work fine.

I suspect it is some sort of software incompatibility, or perhaps a cooling issue.

So far, iClone does not require any Nvidia specific tech. to work. This includes the upcoming GI. Although developed by Nvidia, VXGI runs on any modern DX11 card.

There used to be a guy on here who had iClone running on an i3 CPU, 8 gig of ram, and a GTX 750. He was pushing the low end, but did not have render crashes.

By justaviking - 8 Years Ago

I think I lost track of the question.

Last summer I upgraded my GPU (to a GTX 1080).
The increase in GPU memory helped a lot.
The increase in raw performance also helped.

No other changes to my system.

Rendering times improved anywhere from 10x to 30x depending on the project.

By animagic - 8 Years Ago

I had a similar experience with a system based on i7 2600K (an older Intel CPU). Changing from a GTX 580 to a GTX 980 updated it sufficiently to be useable again for IClone. Like Viking, no other changes to the system.

By Snarp Farkle - 8 Years Ago

I've been having similar issues since the 6.53 update.

For me iClone has only crashed about 5 times but continuously locks up whenever I double click on anything in my Custom Folders and sometimes when I try to save anything to them as well.

Support has tried to help me figure out why but so far I still have the same issues except since I moved the Custom Folders to a USB drive I can save most things without a hangup but not always. It's a crap shoot whenever I'm working on a project whether it'll hang or not and as long as I remember to drag and drop things into the scene they load ok. I've had three crashes in the last couple of weeks so submitted another ticket.

My system should be able to run iClone fine and it did while using the 6.51 and 6.52 updates, that's what has me confused, as far as I can tell no one else has had the same issues with hangups as me since the 6.53 update.

I've made sure that all drivers, software etc. were up to date, uninstalled-reinstalled 4 or 5 times, took control of all Reallusion files for permissions and the only support advice I haven't tried is reinstalling to just the C drive, not so sure that's a step I want to try because it all worked fine before the last update. I'm not blaming Reallusion for these issues, it's obviously something I'm not seeing going on with my machine.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, as of now I don't want to buy iC7 if it can't even run iC6.

By Rampa - 8 Years Ago

I just thought of a potential bottleneck, as I brought up cooling in an earlier post.

There are two types of fan cooling for GPUs. The basic fan type, and the blower-fan type.

The basic fan type requires that your computer case have good fans and ventilation built into it, as the heat is dispersed into the computer case. The blower type is enclosed in a housing that has a fan at one end (odd-looking fan) that blows air through the enclosed housing and out the end of the card. That blows the hot air out behind your computer. Pretty much any pre-built computer you get will have the blower type. If you have a small or crowded case, you should also get the blower type.

By Snarp Farkle - 8 Years Ago

rampa (2/23/2017)

I've been watching my GPU temps and they seem fine, I have iC6 and 3DX running now and this is the report from the "HWiNFO64 Program"

https://forum.reallusion.com/uploads/images/1e2b0dad-f6fe-4d9d-b2b6-12e3.png

By animagic - 8 Years Ago

@Snarp Farkle: Make sure focus is on iClone when you monitor, because that is when the GPU starts working. Looking at the clock speed of your card it is in idle mode. it would also be good to check CPU temperatures.

Another thought: what is your power supply rating? Dell is probably OK, but I used to have an HP that had a low quality power supply that I had to replace.

EDIT: I just downloaded the tool and noticed that if you run iClone with a sizeable project and take the values in the Maximum column, you'll get a pretty good idea of the load and temperatures.

By Snarp Farkle - 8 Years Ago

animagic (2/23/2017)

This is what I got while running the Abandoned House project in loop mode.

I looked on the Dell site and found that it has a 460W power supply. PWA INTEGRATED, 460W, POWER FACTOR CORRECTION, whatever that means lol.

By animagic - 8 Years Ago

I went here: http://www.coolermaster.com/power-supply-calculator/ to check the needed power supply, and 275 Watt is recommended so you have plenty extra.

Also, everything looks fine under load, so your system doesn't seem to be the problem.

By Snarp Farkle - 8 Years Ago

animagic (2/23/2017)

Thanks animagic for looking into this, it's good to know the system is as adequate as I thought it was when buying it, so at least that's one thing out of the way.
Now on to see if the problem is software related, I've tried so many things now my mind is like rice pudding! :crazy:

By Jayso - 4 Years Ago

Would faster SSD's help prevent frame drop during live link animation to UE4? For example, when I try to record the incoming live link face capture stream I'm missing frames. How can I increase performance of the UE4 sequencer recording from the iClone Live Link animation stream?