Advice needed; Building new workstation for Keyshot

Help and Troubleshooting
1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking to build a new PC workstation specifically for high-resolution product rendering in KeyShot. I currently use an Intel i9-9820X with an RTX A4000 and 32GB RAM. While the GPU is still okay, the CPU is aging fast and becomes a bottleneck, especially when working with large, high-poly scenes (30+ million polygons), or semi-complex materials.

At the moment I do not have a clear budget in mind. I want to work out a few different options, cost and performance wise. Lets say;
Tier 1: 5000,-
Tier 2: 10.000,-
Tier 3: 15.000,-

One thing I find difficult is figuring out what actually results in noticeable time savings, and more importantly, how much. Benchmarks are helpful, but translating those scores into real-world gains (especially in KeyShot) is tricky.
My benchmark sheet; Keyshot Benchmark Data - Google Sheets

I’d really appreciate any advice on what parts of a build give the most real-world time savings in KeyShot, and what kind of setup you would recommend based on your experience.

Thanks!
Merijn

2

My old systems were 6 years old, dual xeon gold hp Z8 workstations. 10k each when new.

Just took delivery of 3 new Boxx Apex workstations with intel 285k CPU and RTX5090 gpus. $7500 each.

the difference of course is amazing. To be honest, the CPU speeds for rendering are about the same, but that’s comparing 6 year old dual xeons @$6k a pair to the new 285k @ $499. We switched to GPU rendering and I still can’t comprehend how it can render so fast. We went from rendering scenes overnight for 4+hours to rendering the same scene in about 20 min. Insane.

The good thing is that we use these machines for AE and PS as well, so the faster clock speeds of the 285k is super nice and AE really appreciates the faster core speeds.

RAM type or speed is not going to matter much, just get the most and best you can afford. Last workstations had 64gb and never ran low, new workstations came with 96 by default.

Going from SSD 2.5" sata drives to M2 NVME type drives made a HUGE difference in load speeds. Boxx uses the Taichi based motherboards in this, and its got 6 m2 slots.

We went full bore with the 5090’s as we need these workstations to last a long time. Oscar has done a lot of testing too saying that the 5090’s may not be worth the extra cost, and he may be right. We are banking on the drivers and KS extracting more and more performance out of them though.

In the end I did not see the gains from spending extra on Threadripper or Threadripper Pro chips, and their stability issues that they were still having would not have worked well in a corporate environment. In my opinion if you are going for GPU rendering, base your budget on that, and build the system around it. Figure out what is the largest time suck you deal with on a daily basis, and that for us is rendering and look dev while setting scenes up. Change a matieral, wait to see what it looks like. That workflow due to the GPU’s has sped up at least 50%.

My gut says that there will be a larger and more perceptible speed difference between $5k and $10k budget than there will be between the $10k and $15k budget. This has not been updated in a while, but its worth a look. My own gathered spreadsheet.

image
image644×641 13.5 KB

image
image694×921 23.4 KB

2 Likes
3

Great post Matt! And well, since there are no new 4090s a 5090 is nice because of the extra VRAM but the jump from a 3090 > 4090 is much larger in speed than the jump from a 4090 > 5090.

And Merijn, since you’re located in the Netherlands, a look at the Tweakers pricewatch makes sure you don’t want a 4090 since they are listed now as more expensive than the 5090. Of course that makes no sense, I would happily trade a 4090 for a 5090.

As Matt mentions, I think the difference between a € 5000 machine to a € 10000 is more noticeable than between € 10000 and € 15000.

And even for around € 5000 you can have a computer with the fastest consumer CPU from AMD/Intel, 192GB of memory and a 5090. If you would put in an extra 5090 or 2 extra 5090s the price will rise with like 2500 for a card and your render speed will double or triple.

Multiple GPUs will make it more expensive because of the custom liquid cooling needed or you need a big case and buy some AIO cooled 5090s, you still need to have the space for multiple radiators though. And multiple cars will only increase speed, not the amount of VRAM.

Instead of multiple cards in one machine you could also have multiple PCs and a network license. If nobody works behind those other PCs they can be pretty simple besides the GPU. I’ve no experience though with having multiple machines running KS over network and the network itself will always slow things down.

All the workstation kind of hardware is actually a waste of money if you are using it mainly to render and use other graphic software. A lot of suppliers will try to convince you otherwise, but it really makes no sense. It might would if you run very critical simulation software which also often uses CPU cores but for graphics the consumer grade of these days is perfect. Nvidia and SolidWorks like you also to believe otherwise, it’s not based on anything.

While memory is not that expensive and I was also orientating a bit I did notice that using for memory slots can cause instabilities if you want to run the ram at max speeds. Which means that if you like it to run full speed you are tied to 96GB of ram (2x48). As Matt says it’s not really noticeable if your ram is running at somewhat lower speeds and if you have applications that like more ram, slow but more will win from less but faster.

I do wonder if it’s actually the CPU that becomes a bottleneck with your current system or the amount of RAM. I’m still on a i9-9900K with 64GB and I notice more that if I for example try to photogrammetry software it’s my RAM what holds me back which will make it crawl in the end.

It’s also fun to ask CoPilot about hardware and what your plans are. I did it about a week ago. It actually was pretty clever when I asked I wanted to house multiple cards but it also made mistakes. Like it suggesting a motherboard that doesn’t exist. It must felt embarrassed when I asked for the website :wink: It did however consider my wish to have more spacing between the two first PCIe slots so the intentions were all good.

1 Like
4

I just got this link from a friend from Finland, it’s about new Threadrippers which might be interesting is you do use very heavy CPU related tasks as well.

1 Like
5

Hi Matt and Oscar,

thanks for your help and explanation about parts that make a difference.

I do think one of the biggest bottlenecks at the moment is my RAM. 32GB is just not enough. After that the storage. i currently have a 2.5 sata ssd. As Matt mentioned, upgrading that should make a huge difference. unfortunately my current motherboard does not have any m2 slots.

I was looking at the new AMD Threadripper line up (9970X and 9980x) as a replacement because with 90% of my renderings I use the cpu as the render engine. I’ve tried using the GPU as render engine but almost every time I get weird results in the shadow, AO, and sometimes lighting layers compared to the version I rendered with the cpu. Maybe a skill issue on my end haha.

I do use the GPU in the viewport a lot. Loads way faster than the cpu obviously.

That’s why I am looking for a balanced machine. Beefy CPU for the rendering and maybe to be used as ‘render farm’ in the future, if we decide to scale up the man-power, and a good GPU for the viewport workflow. Apart from Keyshot I use blender and I want the machine also be compatible with SolidWorks, because that is the CAD software we use.

Upgrading the RAM in my current system sounds like an easy and cheap fix, but i think i’ll be looking into a new machine next year again.

Matt, you mention stability issues with these Threadripper cpu’s, what kind of issues are there with these cpu’s and are they linked to Keyshot?

6

I think upgrading your machine is a waste of money because of its generation since it’s the same mine. You will still have PCIe 3 and DDR4 while currently it’s PCIe5 and DDR5. Most memory brands have lifetime warranty so you could always just buy some second-hand memory if you struggle with some scenes. You won’t be able to use it in a new desktop so buying new makes not really sense.

SolidWorks just rust as fine and faster on a consumer GPU with the same price tag. I once tested a few things for someone at Luminaries who thought you would need a pro-series card. I guess SolidWorks has Nvidia stocks.

And maybe (if allowed) you should post some of the issues you’re facing by rendering on GPU or ask support. As Matt mentions it’s really such a speed difference that you won’t think of rendering on CPU again once you get used to the speed of GPU. I’m also happy to look into a scene if you want.

1 Like
7

Yep, i also think upgrading my current machine is a waste of money.

Apart from the render-times my current biggest issue is Keyshot lagging most of the time and freezing up, or sometimes even crashing, when i ask quite simple things, like importing a texture, duplicating a modelset, changing lightning etc. I’ve always had these kind of issue’s but since the 2025 update it got worse. Trying to make any kind of animation or even a complex material is basicly impossible at the moment.

Already asked about the CPU / GPU difference and why i get different results and the basic answer was CPU is slow, but more accurate and GPU is fast and less accurate. Sounds logical, but upping the amount of samples did not make any difference. This was about 1,5 years ago so maybe i should give it another try and see if i still get the same results. learned a lot in the last 1,5 years so that should help.

For a new machine i am currently looking into the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X with an RTX 5090 and 128GB RAM. Thought the prices for a machine like this would be way higher but i could get one for around 7000,- (excl vat). Based on benchmark results it should lower my render time by 80%. Real world i assume it would be lower but still a significant change.

8

Sounds like a great machine, spending that amount on a machine I think I would even put more memory in.

That might be a bit much most of the time but yesterday I was experimenting with some fluid animations which can add something sometimes and I noticed in task manager those Alembic animations need a HUGE amount of memory :slight_smile: I could lower the mesh quality but it’s nicer if I don’t have too.

9

I would have to dig back and see where I was reading, but there were certain MB’s that people on reddit were having issues with the AMD TR family of processors. Again, probably not one of those things where its a high occurance, but high enough to drive the post to the top of the reddit page.

I would certainly monitor your performance on the machine you have now to sort out what is slowing things down. If you do an action, and one core goes to 100% for a bit, or the GPU freaks out and goes to 100% then you can track out down what’s causing the issues. At the same time with C4D, often times during a crash, nothing happens. Literally no sign of what caused it, and the log is only something a dev could read. So, it might not be that much help.

I know in my company I have a least 3 anti virus/security scanners running at all times in the background, and if their scanning tasks overlap, it can take down my machine, They assign them all top priority, and they are NOT efficient in their use of resources. IT got their heads chewed off for a while because of one of the updates instantly slowed everyone’s computers to a crawl. Took the CEO 4 minutes to open his email and have it retrieve all the new stuff, and we heard about it down the hall from his office.

Turn off all background processes you safely can. Every app you install has a slew of background processes it wants to run (adobe and microsoft are the worst) Last count adobe creative cloud had 22 daemons and utilities running in the background and Acrobat STILL took way too long to open a 500k pdf and let me print it.

Anyway- GPU is going to be the biggest bang for the buck, and the most immediate visible results, 100%. True, GPU does still have its quirks, but our images that we make, we can work around those (ie brushed materials) and hope to take advantage of the extreme speed jump in doing more animations. The M2 drives are merely a convenience thing. doesn’t help in any way other than loading/saving copying and other file based operations. RAM, I have PS, IL, KS and email, Teams, and other stuff open all day every day, and I have never touched all 64gb. I’m not working with 12gb KS files though, most of mine are sub 1gb. Your use may vary. Also, there is a lot to be said for a clean install of Keyshot and your operating system.

10

Faster hard drives might surprise you in terms of rendering and working speed. Keyshot, for example will create a 500MB file for a simple scene preview. For a complex render it’ll write 1-2GB of data. For an animation, it might cache 20GB of data. You might save 30 seconds per frame due to extra time for caching and saving as well as the delay in access to cached data sort of dominoes. That’s why L3 cache on the CPU is important for render times, even if rendering with GPU.

The “small” bottlenecks that seem insignificant can really add up to times that are actually quite significant.

Just saving a keyshot file took me 4.39 seconds (it’s large). I saved a copy on sata III drive out of curiosity and it took 26.3 seconds. I save about 40+ times per day, so that would be about 15 minutes per day that I lose to a slow computer component. That adds up to a fairly significant amount of time in a year, and HD speeds effect more than just saving/opening.

1 Like