Mixed Machine RENDERAMA QUESTION

[cjberg]

I would also like to know!

Cj

[interstellar]

Hi Cj and William,

I asked this very same question on the "old" EI forum about three weeks ago. I've lost my link to that old forum but I believe Ian Waters (was it you, Ian?) replied that there would not be a problem adding a new Intel Mac to an old Power Mac renderfarm.

Joe T

[halfworld]

Yup, we've been using them together (1 Intel with 3 G5s) no problems (so far :)...

Ian

[WHD]

Hey CJ, Joe and Ian,


That is great to know. I was concerned that I'd have to start building my render farm from scratch again or assign projects in a machine specific manner one way or the other.

Thanks for the help.

Bill Dempsey

[interstellar]

Hi Mac Intel users,

I'm considering buying an Intel Mac and adding it to my G5 renderfarm. Which machine should be used as the "master"? Our EI manual says we should use the slowest machine as the Renderama master - is that still true?

Thanks,

Joe T

[gdogfunk]

I let my fastest machine be the master because it writes the CCN files the fastest....I can't see dropping back to my G4 867Mhz for my farm master...WAY too slow compared to my G5 Quad 2.5Ghz....so, I'd use the faster machine, if I were you.

Ryan

[vislaw]

I've split rendering between PCs and Macs for a long time with generally happy results. Most problems have occurred due to not updating all machines with the same version so you do need to be consistent with your updates.

This does remind me of a question I've been meaning to ask. Some of my max-using friends have told me that the nature of the 64-bit OS on the windows side is inherently different for calculations than on the 32-bit flavor of XP and Vista. Thus, they can't mix 32 and 64-bit machines on their render farms because some shaders calculate differently. I've never run 64-bit XP so I haven't been concerned about the issue but I intend to in the near future. Does EIAS have a 64-bit version on the PC side? Also, if you have a 64-bit PC will camera nodes render differently than 32-bit cameras as I'm told occurs with Max?

[interstellar]

Hi Mark,

I seem to recall some discussion on the old EI forum about some kind of problem when renderfarming Macs & PCs together, but I can't remember what it was.

Ryan, thanks for your thoughts on this; maybe the manual is out of date? So, you're still using a G4? I gave mine to my mom-in-law when I bought my G5s. She doesn't render with it but it's plenty fast for her web-surfing!

Joe T

[gdogfunk]

Hi Mark,

I seem to recall some discussion on the old EI forum about some kind of problem when renderfarming Macs & PCs together, but I can't remember what it was.

Ryan, thanks for your thoughts on this; maybe the manual is out of date? So, you're still using a G4? I gave mine to my mom-in-law when I bought my G5s. She doesn't render with it but it's plenty fast for her web-surfing!

Joe T

My farm is mixed with G4s going down to 400Mhz all the way up to 867Mhz...they are still great for rendering....of course, they are slower on some things, but with all 22 nodes going (counting PCs), jobs render pretty quickly...got any other G4s you want to give away? ;)

Ryan

[vislaw]

So, you're still using a G4?

Heck, I still have my original BlueWhite G3 in my network! It's kind of a nice reminder of Moore's law to watch its status monitor chugging away in comparison with the other nodes.

I just got word that my new 8-core Mac Pro is supposed to be in next week. Being able to add 8 fast nodes in one box is going to be a trip. I bought it through ElectricImage and got a good deal on the price along with a free upgrade to 6.6.

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