Can I be so bold as to ask what that will cost when it's all said and done?

3000USD before the price drop of the Opterons.. so I paid actually 1400 alone for the Processors... :rolleyes:

-Emo

I ran the same scene through my newly built 3.2GHz P4 last night and it took 50 seconds... 9 seconds slower than your dualie - and, bear in mind, I've overclocked the P4 to 3.68Ghz. At 3.2GHz it was taking 58 seconds.

I then ran the scene on my old 1.2GHz P4 and it took 2m46s ... almost 8x slower!!!

I love being in the FAST club! :beer:

"I then ran the scene on my old 1.2GHz P4 and it took 2m46s ... almost 8x slower!!!"

must be do to the the bus and ram speed.

Absolutely... the P4 is running on a 920MHz FS bus (230*16) and the 2Gb of memory has 2.5CAS latency.

I have no idea what's in the laptop, I suspect a 100Mhz bus.

Also, my apologies for hijacking the thread!

holy of cows.. that one meen A__ computer with that bus and ram..

That would describe it quite nicely! :)

As I was working to a budget, I had to decide if I was going to build a render-monster, a view-port monster, or a jack-of-all-trades. I decided to go down the viewport route as the PC can be rendering while I'm at sleep or at work (or at sleep at work). The money I saved by not buying dual processors was used to buy a Quadro4 980XGL graphics card and a second 17" flat panel.

Last night, I was doing some modeling, with lots windows open on both monitors. I also had a DVD playing a Pink Floyd concert in a window on one of the monitors - the Maya viewport was still giving me 75fps.

I got 1:16 on my Dell M60. It has a 1.7 Intel Centrino Proc.

Can someone tell me where to find the "test scene"? I'd like to see how my workstation performs...

Thx.

It's the rendertest scene from Highend3D.... I've attached the zip.

Yeah, well my Apple G4 1 GHZ Dual did the test scene in 8:12! That's right! Take that. ;)

Longer is better, right? (joke)


Strangely, I got around 4:30 at home on a DP 867 (slower machine). I think the 8:12 may have been because I rendered while I had about fifteen apps open and continued working in them. Still a terrible time on both machines.


Well, at least I've got quality multi-tasking to keep me going for a while. In OS X, I can capture an entire DV tape, render in After Effects, download a 100 MB file, print high quality files to the inkjet, burn CDs and watch DVDs all at the same time with no perceived slowdown, crashes or hiccups (well, maybe a belch here and there). Not bad for a two year old machine.

Now if Alias can just get that code more cooperative with the G5s (1 GIG FS bus) and take advantage if its utterly monstrous architecture, I'd be a happy camper.

It seems the equivalent G5s are about twice as slow right now (in Maya), or half as fast if you prefer. That's with no G5 code whatsoever, so it will be interesting to see what the next release gets us on (me) on that proc.

------

Hux-By "viewport monster" I assume you mean putting more money into the graphics card versus the CPU? Are there other ways to make it more of a viewport monster than a render monster? For me as well, it seems I would prefer a viewport monster most of the time.

For me the "viewport monster" meant having a big, fast, desk environment (2 screens, good gfx card) with lots of fast disk to load files (both app and data) quickly. A render monster would have been all ram and processors.

I came in at 46 seconds on my dual P4 2.8Ghz XEON w/ 2GB RAM

Not bad, considering I dropped less than $1500 on the mo/bo, CPU's, cooling fans, heat sinks, and power supply...

I think the performance would be better if I had a SCSI drive. Right now I'm using a Maxtor 160GB IDE drive.

Also, for some reason, CPU usage only averaged about 80% in performance monitor...

And my machine is of the "viewport monster" variety -- 3DLabs WildcatIII 6210 w/ 428MB RAM and two NEC 18" Flat Panel Displays... No framerate problems here...!

:bgreen:

I'm surprised you only scored 46seconds... I was expecting you to be right there with Emo. With 2GB of RAM, your disk drives aren't even entering into the equation on this render, so that isnt going to improve things.

I'm completely baffled as to why you only see 80% processor usage during the render though... that would drive me nuts! If you could get that 20% to run, you'd be ruling the world!!!

I love having a good card and two monitors... it makes using Maya so much more fluid as you're not always opening and closing windows and panels.