Sooner or later, every Corona Renderer user who has to wait hours for their rendering to finish starts thinking about upgrading their PC. Then they face a question – what exactly should they buy to boost the rendering speed: a processor or a graphics card?
At first, it may seem that creating images should be a job for a GPU. And yes, many real-time render engines (mostly used in video games) do use graphics cards for that. However, in the realistic rendering sphere, everything is not as unequivocal.
In essence, during image rendering, the computer is calculating what color to give to each pixel. Such calculations can be done by either a GPU or a CPU. Each rendering engine is created to use only one of those, though some offer an option to choose which device to use. For example, V-Ray for 3ds MAX versions 4 and higher offers rendering through either a GPU or a CPU; meanwhile, Cycles for Blender has a rendering mode that uses both at the same time.
So what about Corona Renderer – CPU or GPU? Corona Renderer uses only the processor (CPU) to render images. If you think your visualizations take too long, consider upgrading your CPU. Pay attention to the amount of cores and threads, and the values of special render-focused benchmarks, such as Corona Benchmark and CineBench.
However, a graphics card is still important for working in 3ds MAX; it defines the level of comfort you have during a scene set-up and modeling. If your PC freezes or crashes when the polygon count rises or when you rotate and scale objects and move the viewport, it means your GPU is having trouble. Don’t worry, you don’t have to buy the newest GPU there is – models released 3-4 years ago will be more than enough. You also should try a cloud Corona render farm.
Any hardware upgrade is a big investment, especially if you need a powerful CPU (and it will become obsolete in 5-7 years). Using a render farm for your final renders is a great alternative. Megarender is such a render farm. Our cloud render farm lets you upload your scenes any time of night or day and get results many times faster than on your own PC.