RAM and CPU
 

when it comes to maya and compositing etc which is more important? ram or processing power?

I think it depends on how big your scenes are, as far as running maya goes, and it depends on what kind of previews you would like to make when you are compositing. When you composite with AfterEffects, it helps out to watch previews, but It caches everything in your ram, so you would need more ram. When I run Maya, My average scene uses about 700mb-1.1 gb of ram, but then again I make pretty large/complex scenes. It is a hard call just depends on what exactly you want to do. THanks,
Brian

sounds like ram then
what kind of things would benefit from processing power?

It dirrectly effects how long things take to render. May not seem like 10 or 15 sec a frame difference is that big of a deal, but once you get an animation ready to render that is thousands of frames, its kinda nice to have a fast processor. So... It kinda depends. Most of my compositing shots are pretty short, so if it were me I would get the ram, but it depends on how much stuff you may have for rendering. Hope this helps!
Brian

both the things work together.... RAM + Processor + Graphics card

all are one part... when compositing the size of the scene is what matters.. your ram will be eaten by after effects.. and the rest is processing power.. .AMD's are good at such places...

for example if you start rendering your animation and stuff, then one thats like 3 mins, 10 mins etc, ,,, will kill your CPU...

and in maya.... ram is very important..... and equally is processor... you will need atleast a 512 megs to work properly with maya... i am not saying that you can work with less than that... but 512 megs is good minimum amount...

for compositing a 256 would be fine... but you need processing power there... unless you are a buddhist monk and have a lot of patience, you will need to get a very fast processor...

hope that helps,
Tariq

when you say very fast, would a very fast single (like an AMD XP2800) be ok? or do you mean very fast as in dual AMD MP2600?

damn... that tells me that you are not a buddhist monk... :)....
that would be awesome!!! nem.... damn you won a lottery or something???

no lol my dads buying it :D
he doesnt no what hes buyin atm :S nor do i

hehe... same case here... everything bought by my dad....
but he knows what he is buying...... tought when my dad is a computer hardware engineer... hehe

Hmm... I have a dual 2.4 (AMD) and it works really well. But I am sure a single would work pretty fast as well. Thanks,
Brian

Ok, i didnt have time to read many of the posts.. but the top one. In my opinion, a computer is like a bottle, its only as fast as your slowest component... so it bottlecaps the speed.. you could have the best processor.. but a shitty vga card.. and well, yes it would then run at the general speed of that vga card. Processor speed for me is not incredibly important.... if you get a 2.4 ghz processor.. thats plenty for the time being. Its the RAM and Video card that truly count. As for the bottlecap idea, its true.. seeing my computer ran slower than it should until i installed a new sound card, then it was blazing :D.

BTW, you can make it by with 256 ram, with 512 ram you can do most of your editing in maya, but cannot do much else, and with 1 gig of ram you can do multi tasts (i think.. im at the 512 ddr stage :P). When i render a scene though, it gobbles up all my ram and then i just have to wait :). oh, also.. another question i was wondering. If you had 512 ddr ram in your computer, and then a video card with 256 ddr ram, do those combine? or are they totally different things.... for video cards i never did know the answer to that :P.

i think theyre totally diff things, but i dnt no :confused:

what do we think of radeon 9700 pros as the gfx card for maya?

i had that a quite a while back.... it rocked!!!

why did u change?