[Bf-funboard] Physical Memory and Cycles

[Knapp]

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 5:12 PM, Nkansah Rexford
<nkansahrexford at gmail.com> wrote:
> @Knapp. For me, yes, have researched everywhere for speeding cycles. But
> the issue from Ryan has to do with, Can RAM supplement GPU for rendering if
> one doesn't have nvidia for cycles?
>
> It isn't possible now, but can it be done?
>
> I believe if its possible and done, it can go a long way to close the gab
> between cycles and people like myself.
>
> AMD and Intel i guess aren't making any plans of supporting Blender soon (I
> stand to be corrected though)
>
> rex

You have to understand programming. Memory only helps if it can be
used for something that speeds up the calculations. For example if you
are working a big database and you want to sort it, then you can load
it all into memory and sort it, if you have enough ram to hold all the
date or a way to sort big chunks in memory. This is way faster than
moving records around on the hard drive one by one.

I don't know how cycles really works but it is ray traced, I think.
This means that you have a vector or ray that bounces around from
camera surface to the light and you calculate the color based on this
ray. Problem is that you have to do this for every ray and that means
a LOT of them. Ram does not help this. Having a cpu for each ray does.
Thus a CPU with 12 cores is good but a GPU with 1000 is WAY better and
you see this in the test results.

Other factors are how much ram you system has for holding the .blend
and also how much the GPU has for hold the model.  Also the pipe size
between the ram and the GPU or CPU and the speed of the CPU/GPU.

Devs please correct me, if I am wrong or point out things I missed.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

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