Technical Question: Cinema and Dual?!

[LucentDreams]

sorry for the halfassanswer, but I haven't tried C4D on dual cpu or net, butI can say that C4D does support Dual by basically splitting the image into two renders, top half and bottom half.

Advantages and disadvantages that I know of, net renders take longer to set up and both machines need all the plugins used in a file. The don't provide in progress previews either.

Duals have one problem in that if you have an image where the bottom half of the image is really complex with some hardcore AA, and the top half is sky, the top half will be done in no time at all, and you willhave grankids before the other is done )well definite exaggeration but you know what I mean)

[DXtreme]

thx kaiskai.....
the problem what i've now is that my box needs lightyears to render 800x600 radiosity/antialising on.....
so i think i could wait when the second half is rendering ;-)

anyway thx again..is there something i need to know about the cpu's...problems with adlons/pentiums...special rammmoduls to use?!

[imashination]

Originally posted by Kaiskai
Duals have one problem in that if you have an image where the bottom half of the image is really complex with some hardcore AA, and the top half is sky, the top half will be done in no time at all, and you willhave grankids before the other is done )well definite exaggeration but you know what I mean)

Incorrect i'm afraid. A dual machine will indeed split the render into 2 halves, however if one half finishes before the other, then the remaining portion of the image will again be divided between the 2 processors, so both CPUs are always fully active.

[DXtreme]

thx guys..now i know that the option of a dual machine is there and i'll see how it works when i've my machine ready!

thx a lot!

[verti]

imashination is right...

DXtreme:
im working od duals (macs) for few years now... and all i can say is that they are worth their money!!! i think i will not buy a single cpu machine i the nearest future...

they are great if you are a small animation studio...

besides if you need to render a huge still... guess... :)

take care,
verti.

[DXtreme]

thx verti!

i think my next box will be a dual thing,but not a mac (hey i'm student...have not that much money!)
but thanks to all who spend time for this thing...you helped me to decide!

[Erik Heyninck]

Another possibility is getting a second comp and make a crosslink network. This way each processor's got its own ram and specs without having to share anything with the other.
A second advantage is that you can backup your data on the other one's hdd's.
A third advantage is that you can divide your apps between the two. Many of us use Photoshop which is a real ram vampyre.

Me too I have a PIII800 with 512MRam, and even with my simple beginner's renders I noticed that time can become verrry long when your scen gets a bit complicated. If I go for a new comp, it'll be the network solution.

When you have the money, you can go for an Armari RH860HT:
Dual Xeon 2.2GHz, 1GBRDRam (max 4GB), Elsa Synergy card, 8OGBHDD, DVD-CDRW combo, Soundblaster Audigy, Win XPPro. With Hyper threading, supported by WinXPPro, each processor acts as two. This gives you 8,8 GHz processing power...sigh...

[prayas]

or check www.apple.com/powermac

Just for info cinema works also very good on mac.

[Carnifex]

For duals I am heavily inclined to recommend the Athlon MP over the Xeon, for the main reasons of price and performance. The Athlon MP uses a point-to-point bus topology which is laymans terms means that each processor has it's own bus to the memory. On the Intel based duals, the processors use a shared bus, which means that their bandwidth to the memory is effectively half of what a single processor would get. Depending on the kind of work you do, that could mean a performance decrease.
I would go for a dual with atleast 512 of ram for each processor, preferably a gig.
No offense to the mac people here, but the performance and price just isn't there on the Apple's to justify purchasing them over an Athlon or Xeon based system. Which is one of the reasons you see more and more production houses use athlon-based workstations, despite being Mac-oriented.

Regards

Ian

[DXtreme]

yes thats my opinion too!
i think i'll use the MP from Atlon (at his highest possible Mhz-rate!)
and of course a lots of ram!
(my current sys has 640 MB and it's useful!!!

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