how is it that I bake a project and it takes 7.5 hours
and i make 1 minor change
and it only takes 1.5 hours bake again?
using all the same settings.
Interesting, normally both times should be similar. Do you remember what was the minor change? Is it possible that the baking device was different between the bakes?
Could you send a problem report from the Shapespark application so we can see if the logs have any indication why there is such a difference? Material change shouldn’t noticeably influence the baking time.
I did not get any errors messages
not sure how send a problem report from the Shapespark application
From the main application window Help & Support tab with Attach Shapespark logs to the report. checked. Don’t worry to write any description, we have enough info from the forum, just put any letter there, because the form requires description to be non-empty.
@bray, Have you checked what device was used when baking? Maybe the first was baked using CPU and the second one on GPU?
no all setting were the same and both were GPU
We tested these two scenes and were not able to reproduce the time difference on our computers. Our strongest suspicion is that the difference is due to the mobile GPU throttling. There are posts from users of your card (Quadro M2200) that report throttling related performance problems: "m2200" "quadro" "throttling" - Google Search
Could you run a GPU monitoring tool, for example GPU-Z Graphics Card GPU Information Utility , to check if the GPU speed decreases during the bake?
This scene is quite small, so about 1h baking card is something that you should be seeing with Quadro M2200 running at the full speed (the scene bakes in about 20 minutes on our desktop GPU, and about 2h on CPU).
So it’s baking too slow not too fast
Yes, 7.5h for 800 samples of this scene is too slow.
is there something that can estimate how long the bake should take?
If you hover over the bake progress bar a rough estimation is displayed.
A more accurate method is to disable post-processing filters (Enable filters checkbox in the bake tab), bake with a small number of samples (say 10) and multiply the bake time by FINAL NUMBER OF SAMPLES / NUMBER OF TEST SAMPLES.
For example, if the bake phase takes 1 minute for 10 samples, it should take about 80 minutes for 800 samples.
The post-processing phase adds some time to the total time, usually a couple of minutes, but this time doesn’t depend on the number of samples.