Mar 2011
1 / 3
Mar 2011
Mar 2011
captain-granite
Mar '11

Hi,

I am a last years 3D animation student and currently working on a dual core AMD with a Quadro FX3700 card and 8GB Ram.
While I am progressing in the course, the scale of my projects are progressing aswell and my current system is having a hard time to keep up.

The poly count of one my latest projects, a bush environment, with 3 million verts and fully textured, has realy stretched the limits of my system. Moving the scene around is a bit buggy and hardware texturing is almost completly stuffing up my Ram. High quality rendering won't work at all. (I won't deny that my scene could be more optimized)

An other project, photo realistc car modeling has a polycount of 1.8 million and is as far it gets, being still smooth, moving it around in the viewport. Mental Ray shaders don't work in the viewport

Render time is dramatic and this is the major focus for my upgrade. I am willing to invest a fair bit of student money in this new system with some freelance work in mind for the future.

Budget; $2000  for core components

Buying the fastes CPU on the market i7 990X for improving render time.

Question: For 1 i7 990x system I can buy 3 AMD 1090T systems which will give me 85% more real time CPU power than the one intel system. Would this be smart to DO ?
Do I always need to run backburner to make use of the other systems ? What if I want to do a quick photorealistic frame render ?

The benifit will be that I can render on the other systems and still have one system to work with.

Buying a decent pro Grpahics Card. Nvidea Quadro 2000 or 4000

Question: I have read on this forum that it doesn't make much sence to buy a pro Grapics card for your home projects due to small scale projects.
When will this make sence ?

Upgrade Ram from 8 GB to 12GB or 16GB

I hope you can help me out, I realy want to spent money on what I need and not on what I would like.

  • created

    Mar '11

  • last reply

    Mar '11
  • 2

    replies

  • 1.9k

    views

  • 2

    users

joojaa
Mar '11

The on screen performance and render performance are 2 separate issues. Same optimization will not do good for both so you need to make a compromise of some kind. I'm also not sure 2000$ is enough for you. so even if  you get some imporvement your most likely not going to se the kind of stellar improvement you think your money should buy you.

So for fast interaction you want the fastest possible single core, and fastest possible graphics card. That is even if maya and max multithread the gui slightly your performance is not based on how many cores or cpus you have but rather just the raw power of of the cpu cycles. This translates to very expensive processors, the top of the line flagships with most megeherz (normalized so you can compare between architectures off course).

For software rendering you want lots of memory and lots of cores which in total make more performance and the data can be simply parallellized.

Mental Ray shaders don't work in the viewport

Yes mentalray shaders dont work in the view port no mater what money you throw at the problem.

The poly count of one my latest projects, a bush environment, with 3 million verts and fully textured,
has realy stretched the limits of my system.

Theres no magic in pushing more details, you can do that. whatever you do you will ALWAYS be at this limit. The true skill of a good worker is the ability to do what 3 million does for you with half a million. Thats the trick. Remeber this, nio amount of money spent saves you here. With infintely expensive systems you still have this problem.

captain-granite
Mar '11

Thanks for your reply Joojaa.

I understand that $2000 isn't to much in workstation land but I'll have to make the best of it.

The idea for know, based on your input is;
Intel i72600K 3.4 Ghz with 16GB 1600Mhz Ram for my master workstation. On a core to core base the Intel beats the AMD by far.
Two AMD 6 core CPU and 8 GB Ram stations as my personal "render farm". On a price performance base these are the best.

Leaves me with a small budget for the Graphics Card. I have read that these cards work best if they can load your whole scene into their RAM. So 1GB of RAM should be sufficient for me.

I am thinking about the ATI FirePro v5800 vs Nvidia Quadro 2000. I am leaing towards the ATI, their line up seems to work better with Maya (older reviews). The Nvidia doesn't do so well with Maya acourding to their own benchmarking.

"Theres no magic in pushing more details, you can do that. whatever you do you will ALWAYS be at this limit. The true skill of a good worker is the ability to do what 3 million does for you with half a million. Thats the trick. Remeber this, nio amount of money spent saves you here. With infintely expensive systems you still have this problem."

I surtenly hope to master that skill. That would also mean that I would be beter of by keeping my current system that will force me to be creative with polycount. Bugger, I really hoped to have a good excuse for spending money this time.