Linux Maya - performance?

[rotaryman]

were using Maya 5.0.1 on Linux here at work, and I am not really seeing any significant performance gains, probably mostly due to adequate NVidia drivers. But I have been experiencing quite a few bugs within maya that are not found in the Windows version. Such as the selection tools not working all the time. Grow selection and Select continuous edges tends to flake out all the time.

Greg

[violet903]

I use Maya at work and we have the same problems like rotaryman, more bugs and more memory usage. I would love to get rid of Windows but its the better OS for Maya.

[Epicentre]

i found a 20-30% boost in rendering performance on maya linux compared to mac/windows. but i found the interface and workflow to be different... maybe because the linux window server. (i have it installed on redhat 8... using kde3). i have found that i can work faster in windows with maya than under linux and only use the linux version to do large batch renders overnight etc.

[rotaryman]

Originally posted by Epicentre
i found a 20-30% boost in rendering performance on maya linux compared to mac/windows. but i found the interface and workflow to be different... maybe because the linux window server. (i have it installed on redhat 8... using kde3). i have found that i can work faster in windows with maya than under linux and only use the linux version to do large batch renders overnight etc.

Your definitely right on the money with the rendertimes. But I was wondering, how do you get around bringing your maya files over platforms, we've had some problems doin that where I work, typically when dealing with file addressing. For example on a scene created in windows, when its brough over to linux, maya can't figure out the texture paths and decides it wants to crash. We've been able to create scripts that makes a work around this problem, but it just seems goofy that Alias hasn't address the issue of cross platform compatibility more thoroughly.


On another notem we just installed the latest Nvidia drivers on our linux systems here at work, and I have noticed an increase in viewport performance, so things maybe lookin better for

My two cents

Greg

[acidream]

rotaryman, how are your texture paths set up in the windows file, because I use windows at work and linux at home, and when I bring my files home everything works perfectly. I have my texture paths so that they read like this /sourceimages/filename.iff not C:\blah\blah\filename.iff When I bring my files home, I just rar the whole project directory and unrar it when I get home. I have even put the scene file and textures all in one directory, and when I open the file maya automatically changes the texture paths for me.

[beaker]

It is much faster for rendering. The ram usage is 1/2-1/4 of the ram as on windows. No more stupid "memory exception thrown" like you get on Xp all the frickin time. Shadow maps on windows use a huge amount of ram and you can't use above 2k shadow maps without getting that error. Linux has no problem using multiple 8k shadow maps.

Particles use alot less ram too and work at really high particle counts. Try creating 1 million + particles on windows and it will just stagger and finally crash. Linux has no problem with huge numbers of them.

The gui is much faster too. Windows pop up much faster, especially when you pop between the control panel and the attribute editor which seems to take forever to come up on windows. Alot of this has to do with Maya originally being written for motif on sgi, so running it on motif on linux isn't much different.

Textures or any other reference files are not an issue between platforms as long as you set your project file and have your textures/reference files inside your project directory. When you deal with network drives on windows that your moving to linux do not point to files on mounted drive letters, but instead go through the network neighborhood so all your file path names are UNC file paths "//servername/sharename/path/to/file".

A few linux limitations: no movie files for flipbooks(there are scripts on highend that get around this). If your not using ALSA, sound sucks ass and won't sync right. No flash/toon render on linux. I know there are others but they aren't comming to mind right now.

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