Hi, newbie user here using 1st month trial on a 2015 iMac with just 8gb ram looking for hardware advice please? I will be subscribing to Sketchup Pro as soon as the 1m trial expires.
I’m hoping to learn to use Vray or other plugins and wondering is I should upgrade to 32gb ram for c £ 130 cost or 64gb ram at c £ 400 cost - or even switch to a new £ 400-600 windows desktop?
My main Imac is the 8gb, 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, AMD Radeon R9 M390 2 GB version.
Can any advise if upgrading to 64gb ram would make rendering times much faster whilst the graphics card is still only 2gb, or should I spend the same cost to buy a midrange new windows desktop ?
Thanks in advance
Adding additional RAM won’t speed up v-ray rendering for you - there are very few computer applications where 64GB would currently be needed.
I’d be tempted just to get an extra 8GB module in there , which will help day to day working.
I would imagine that budget might not get you much of an improvement over what you have now - although if you can get a machine with an Nvidia graphics card, you can use the the hybrid v-ray rendering engines (CUDA/RTX) which are able to use the GPU and the CPU together, which can be faster.
If you are shopping around you can run the V-Ray benchmark on your mac and then compare the score to other CPUs in other desktops and see whether they perform better - that might be a good place to start.
V-Ray 5 Benchmark | Chaos