It imports a large STEP file in just a few seconds, like no other program, but when it goes to rendering speed, I find that the process is very slow in highest quality output, 24Bit colour, 1280x720 full frame. It needs about 1 hour 15 minutes with each of 8 Xeon cores running at 100% duty to complete one full frame!?
All checkboxes are enabled in the raytracing dialog (with adaptable antialiasing and multiprocessor option enabled).
If the shadow and soft shadow checkbox are disabled, rendering is very fast (less than 15 sec for one complete pass) but it's quite unrealistic.
The same sequence is done with software rendering in less than 4 seconds, but also it's quite low quality.
Adding shadows to raytracer makes a big diference in quality but it's unbearably too slow!
I'm using the latest pair of Intel Quad core Xeon processors running at 2 GHz each, on Intel 5000 series motherboard 1333MHz frontspeed, with 4 Gig of RAM, where it uses less than 1 Gig,
Windows x64 pro, DirectX 9.
Any suggestions how to speed up the raytracing?
Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems