Optimum G5 Render settings?

[dhatch01]

Does anyone have any helpful tips for getting the G5 set up (both within Lightwave and without) to give optimum render times?

Segment memory? Threads? Energy Control Panel? Other?

Here are my benchmarks on the Tracer Radiosity on a Dual2Ghz G5 with 2GB RAM, running LW7.5c and 10.28, Processor performance set to Highest:

Segment Memory = 64

1 Thread = 10m52s
2 Threads = 9m3s
4 Threads = 6m18s
8 Threads = 5m42s

Just for the fun of it, the same test on my G4 733 and 1 thread took 36m8s.

This system was fresh out of the box, and LW is the only software I have installed so far.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[mlinde]

1) When you render, turn off the Energy Saving Options to put the HD to sleep and to put the system to sleep.

2) Segment memory: set it to render in one segment. The only time you wouldn't do this is when you don't have enough RAM left over to actually render (it will error out).

3) Threads, in general, should be set to 2 or 4. Some plugins will render slower with 2/4/8 threads, so always do a test frame first. If 1 is faster than 4, then the plug-ins aren't threaded, and you should set this to 1. If you are rendering via LWSN, threads should be set to 1.

4) Other? don't make image maps larger than they need to be, don't have features turned on you don't need (radiosity, causticts, refractions). 99.9% of the time Medium AA is the best compromise between quality and speed for anti-aliasing. That other 0.1% of the time you probably want to render with Low or Enhanced Low.

5) The hardest one to confirm -- if you run the OS from one drive and render to another you may have slight improvements. This is wholly a disk access thing, and only comes up in scenes where LW eats up all your available RAM and your system needs to access the HD as a scratch disk to do file I/O writing.

That's about all I can think of, other than optimize your scene (polygons, lights, objects, etc) as much as possible to minimize render times.