Shaderlight forums

Hello Steven,

The quick answer is: get as much CPU power as you can, and ‘enough’ RAM.

Shaderlight will use as many CPU cores as the computer will give it, so more is always going to be better, as long as the operating system can present them all. RAM is a bit more complicated. If the renderer exceeds the amount of RAM available, it will slow to a crawl as the computer shuffles memory between RAM and disk, but having more RAM than is needed for a given render will not speed it up any further.

My main workstation is a six year old Mac Pro with 12 cores and 16GB of RAM, which was top of the line at the time, but middle of the road now. 16GB seems to be enough for almost every scene I’ve come across, but I would probably specify 32GB in a new machine these days, to be on the safe side.

If you have the budget to consider really high-end workstations (dual 12- or 18-core processors), then unfortunately there aren’t any Macs in that space at the moment. Otherwise, performance between PC and Mac is pretty similar at comparable processor setups.

Shaderlight doesn’t currently use the video card for rendering, and the speed of the disk drive will have negligible impact on render times.

Regards,
Shaderlight support

Hello Steven,
I am an architect with a small practice in Belgium.
It is fun working with Shaderlight but I also have a issue with the cost for a
workstation powerful enough for working fast with Shaderlight.  Time is money these days
and the rendertimes in Shaderlight are long, very long sometimes and that I think is
an important issue you have to know when buying Shaderlight.
There are some very good renderprograms out there, working not on your cpu but on the videocard.

Workstations with 8 or 16 or more cores and RAM up to 32, 64, or 128 GB are to expensive for
a small practice architect, just to have faster renders with Shaderlight.