Comuter Fast enough?
 

Hi i have been learning maya on a mac, as i am a digital media designer and that is primarilly the platform we use...But I finally ran out of patients as maya just does not run that well on it. So i ordered a pc with this configuration:

intel core 2 duo 3.0ghz
2gb ram gonna upgrade to 4
1gb nvidia geforce 9500gt video card
320 gb hd
nvidia 750 sli motherboard

Hoping maya will fly on it?

i have a macbook at home and thats what i run maya on, i was thinking of getting a pc too although i would get a quad core.

yea i obviously wanted to get the fastest thing i could afford, and that was what i got...if i had the money definitely would have gone with a quad core. My mac actually runs it pretty darn well...but when you get to all the smooth, shaded and textured poly stage it starts to bog down... a lot

I run Maya 8.5 PLE on a reaaallly old computer. It's a dell dimension 8200 I think.

Anyways, it has:

64 MB NVidea GeForce2 with TV out
Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz single core processor
80GB Hard drive
512 MB RAM

and other pretty horrible specs =)

Alas, it works, not as good as I'd like, but I'm not really doing much heavy duty stuff. Note the PLE (I'm a newbie, and still learning :D)

Those specs look good to me though. If you had some extra money to spend though, and if you're doing heavy duty stuff, you might have wanted a quad core. But... "extra" money doesn't exist, does it? ;)

Good luck with your new PC. Tell us how MAYA runs on it.

dude it'll run fine... im running it pretty flawless on a dell optiplex 520 gx

p4@3.0ghz
512mb RAM
(i think) 256mb random gfx card
75gb HD

it only gets slow at around 500,000 pollies and, renders are slow some times:beer:

I run maya fine on a G4! (32mb graphics!)

I don't know if it will fly but it's more then you'll need. you don't even need to upgrade the RAM. I suggest you should see how it works first and only then think about upgrading further.

I wouldn't go for a quad though since the technology isn't yet efficient. My friend has a quad and it goes like Core1:98%, Core2:25% and Cores 3 and 4 on ~0%...
Benny

BTW, I beat all of you: P4 2.6 GHz, Radeon 9550 (not too long ago it was Nvidia 5200 FX), 1 GB RAM (not too long ago it was 512 MB with one F***ED up stick)...

Bah, Maya 08 on a 1.7 Athalon XP, 1gig of 133 RAM, and a Gforce 4000 card, thats old school, and it still runs it pretty much ok, you need to keep deleting the history but it works! Although I never use it its now just an internet and render machine.

another thing about the quad is that there will only be noticeable gains in speed if maya uses multithreading technology, in order to slip up tasks... which i have no idea if it does...

Think it was 8.5 that multi threading was introduced

there ya go...:beer:

For some reason everyone says that 8.5 was the first version to be multithreaded (the interface, that is), but 6.5 on my ancient two-way SMP workstation, whenever I scale something, or move the camera, anything - task manager shows near identical utilization of both my cores. Am I missing something here?

My advice is that if you are going to do lots of intensive rendering on complex scenes, go for the quad core CPU and upgrade the RAM.

Might be wrong, but I think some parts were multi, others wern't. 8.5 was the version that was "unified"

it's the programs your friend is running that is the problem
obviously if two processors aren't doing anything then he aint running anything that takes advantage of it
but of course you already knew that right? ;)

i made my quad core go nuts....

i currently have:

2.5GHz quad core
4GB RAM 1033GHz (needs more :p)
ATI graphics card, something like a 4580? 5480? i dunno, i dont know anything about graphics card models, but its 512mb/gb, whichever graphics cards are at....
650GB HDD (not really that big, but it will do for now)

the otherday when exporting something from after effects the RAM just shot up to being 91% used but the processors were only at like 50%

then when i rendered something in Maya the ram shot up to about 51% used and the processors shot up to 100%

fun times

Chirone is right. It isn't a problem with the CPU, its the software being unable to take advantage of the cores.

The only "problem" with quad-core CPUs is that you have four very fast processors sharing the same bus to the memory and system, which is not good becuase they all want to use that bus, but only one core can at any one time (unless you have a Xeon, which has two such buses). This however, isn't really so bad, the "problem" only exists in certain situations and in theoretical stuff.

Anyways, the funny thing is that people knew how to write programs that can use more than one core/CPU since the 1980s, but much of the software these days still can't take advantage of it. Its the "640 KB ought to be enough for everyone" law proving correct.