Benchmark, Maya, Dual, Quad,

[imashination]

Originally posted by blue magic

Q) Will maya make use of all 4 processors when rendering?

Q2) Which proccecors are the best?

Q3)Would The Cheetah X15rpm 18 GB HD (http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/jan2000/gn2000224000731.htm) improve rendering speed?


Yes

Niether will dissapoint.

Not really

[JDex]

Okay, I honestly can't contribute a whole lot here, but it really does look like you've done alot of "homework" already... but I must ask... am I reading this correctly.

Originally posted by blue magic
-maya 5 - 9999 cpu render nodes

9999 as in Nine-thousand, Nine-hundred and Ninety-Nine Render Nodes... 9999 processor render farm??? are you kidding me? :surprised

Can I crash in your basement and clean your floors for access to this powerhouse... pretty-please??? :D

[bluemagicuk]

Originally posted by imashination
Yes
Niether will dissapoint.
Not really

And with mental ray ?? ( I should have asked that right off the bat)Originally posted by JDex
am I reading this correctly.
9999 as in Nine-thousand, Nine-hundred and Ninety-Nine Render Nodes... 9999 processor render farm??? are you kidding me? :surprised
Can I crash in your basement and clean your floors for access to this powerhouse... pretty-please??? :D

LoL your most welcome to crash my basement .. i will just get my "tools" ready
Mu ha ahahah a hahha ha :D
I didnt mean I had 9999 cpu's at my beck and call (getting there). I meant that it is something
to consider Ie the fact that you could have 1-9999 cpu's rendering one frame
with maya software with something like Netscale (http://www.rendercorp.com/RMX_Site/HomeFrame2.htm) or a quad,dual.
It splits a frame up into chunks on however many comps you have the licence attatched to and then
recalculates the finished version on the "host" computer. Very cool. With some limitations.
But it does not work with mental ray though ... mental ray for maya only has
2 cpu licences :(
So I am investigating the bigest baddest system I can get my hands on primarily with mental ray in mind:)

[Vyyper]

On the subject of the Highend3d maya test scene... with my dual Opteron 244's, 1gb PC3200 ECC Reg DDR, I got 43 seconds. Those are the middle of the road Opterons, too. (1.8GHz)

Mental Ray should take advantage of Quad Processors, but I believe the license is more expensive (unless you're using MR for Maya)

I would say that dual Opterons would be the fastest for Maya rendering. (but Xeons are faster in Lightwave and 3d Studio Max because of SSE2 optimizations in both programs)

The speed of the hard drive will only matter very VERY slightly in total render times. I have a 10,000 rpm 8mb cache SATA Western Digital Raptor (36gb) and it seems just a tad quicker in file write times when rendering out frames for animations.

www.2cpu.com will probably be a good place to go. Go to their forums, go to their website and read the articles, and go to their irc channel (irc.freenode.net #2cpu). Those people know their stuff about dual and quad systems.

And with the Tyan Thunder K8QS coming out very soon, there should be a whole new host of Quad Opteron benchmarks to go by.

If you would like me specifically to run any particular benchmarks on my dual Opteron machine just let me know, I'm more than happy to render a few frames of whatever for people. I know sometimes benchmarks on websites are set up in a 'perfect' environment.. so it's better sometimes to know what the standard person gets on the same benchmarks.

Good luck!

[martinw]

Originally posted by Vyyper

I would say that dual Opterons would be the fastest for Maya rendering. (but Xeons are faster in Lightwave and 3d Studio Max because of SSE2 optimizations in both programs

Opteron has SSE2 as well.

[Vyyper]

While it is true that the Opterons have SSE2 as well, they still don't run as fast as Xeons in Max and Lightwave. But I think Opterons do perform better in Photoshop 7 now. (not CS though)

[Lorecanth]

mental ray scales by threads... more processors more threads rendering. The bottlenecks at that point are the RAM and the hardrives.... Againg scene dependent.

[bluemagicuk]

Originally posted by Lorecanth
mental ray scales by threads... more processors more threads rendering. The bottlenecks at that point are the RAM and the hardrives.... Againg scene dependent.
So you are sure that mental ray for maya (maya 5) would use all 4 proccesors on a quad system?

[MCronin]

Mental Ray for Maya wouldn't work with 4 processors, just 2. That's why they give it away for free. if you want to support more than 2 procs or a farm, you need to get Mental Ray standalone.

You don't want a quad processor machine anyway, that's for high end servers. You get diminishing returns in Multi-processor systems while the cost shoots through the roof. For what you pay to build a 4 processor server you could probably buy a couple blades, or build a stack of cheapo single proc machines for a renderfarm, and get much better results.

[bluemagicuk]

Loverly thanks for the advice everyone ... anyone got anything else to add?? ... benchmarks ect gimme some links if you have any handy :)

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