klausesser wrote:

On this evening i talked to some cracks about machines - because my MacPro from 2008 is coming into age and Apple´s actual MacPro line will be replaced
by a new one in February afaik . . but . .

80% of the 3D-artists suggested switching to an - excellent - PC-architecture . . . that made me thinking

Hi Klaus,
if PC is a possible choice for you, you should have a look into latest c´t magazine (Nummer 20). There they have a closer view on workstation based PCs.

greetings to Düsseldorf
Chris

>It´s obvious that a fast GPU speeds up editing dramatically - but has none to few effect on rendering. Sorry: i missed the thread dealing with hardware here recently - guess i was a bit distracted by superfluous arguing . . roll<

Well Klaus, as you state there are renderers and rederers.....for instance Luxrender runs on the (OpenCL) driver of the video card and the processor for shaders that can't be rendered in OpenCl (excellent renders by the way, only low on the performance side)....Blenders Cycle should also run on OpenCL but has been ported to CUDA only (by Brecht van Lommel).....because well OpenCL is a mixed bag of tricks especially on Radeon board/AMD boards (would advise against them for that reason)....now my PC contains a middrange Radeon board (6750 to be precise) and I'm going to upgrade a little so I asked Santa for a GTX660 Ti which does improve render speed by a factor 5 (on a comparable system as some net research shows)....that should bring two things:

1) Rederingmode in Blender Cycles would be more resposive (though the humble 6750 is handling things quite nicely)

2) Total redering times of complex scene's using light emiting material, caustics and specular and reflective shaders (verry complex raytracing) from 6 (six) hours to 1 hour and 15 minutes.....

Problemo nummero uno.....power supply.....wattsI have enough (450 to be precise and the 660 is certified to run on a 450 watt power supply (the MCI is), but I need 2 6 pinn PCIe connectors and I have only one.....so a 530 watt power supply (80 approved) will be added to the pudding (2.5 kg to lug for Santa's raindear).

Problemo nummero duo: PCIe 2.0 buss......checked and not a problem since bus speed will only slightly limit my cards performance.

Problemo nummero trei: i5 on my mainboard....well an i7 would be better, but i've made a habbit of not comparing performance with other systems but with my own system before the upgrade and a 4 to 5 times performance upgrade would be more then welcome.

Now to be exact I could do with a better PC altogether.....but hey, step by step please a D600 including Promote is also in the bleachers.....these card's are SLI and when prices drop and a 32 Gbyte i7 (third gen will do) and 4 PCIe slot machine arrives I will then add two othe MSI's to get 1344 CUDA cores x 3......or even upgrade to 2 690's. But strangly old 580 and 590 perform better with CUDA rendering on Cycles since these contain faster clock speeds and more pipelines. But hey, not to be obtained new and second hand high end gaming hardware is well, a matter of trust (which I do not posses, I know my overclocking prowes).

Questione uno: Does anyone know if APP also likes 660 Ti cards......would not like to be confronted with a black editing screen or crap like that

Questione due: Does anyone know if APP/G will be ported to use CUDA redering......what consequenced would that have....memory wise.....render in card sised chuncks, and what performance increase would be possible......or do I have a really bad idea.....

I would advise a GTX690 in a PC (fast enough by all means at over 3000 CUDA core and 2 GPU's running in sinc).....for a Mac probably more on the Quadra line (4000 or 6000)......wich is more expensive.....for me a 660 Ti with 3Gb off ram will do.......

>the rendering is rather fast anyway cool even with big stitches...<

Hmzzzz, not on my machine Klaus especially not with bigger stitches.....a 7 shot FE pano, well that takes about 10 to 12 minutes to render but as you know as well, one render usually gets you knowhere.....so 4 to 5 renders to get an image like this

http://stomoxys.home.xs4all.nl/MM/Porque%20No.html

right (avoid ghosting and all and no HDR since not possible with so many people running around) at least and then well, speed counts, so a bit of CUDA magic would be welcome.....but CUDA is more for 3D like the shot below so I don't know wether a 2D VR scene would benefit that much from CUDA as a full 3D scene like my kitchen would do (at 1920 1080 it takes 52 minutes to render on my machine).......btw Blender Cycles and every vertex, texture and what not made by me (except the floor tiles), without CC and Compositing (for glow and lighting effects)......

Greets, Ed.

Yeps Klaus, your Mac's got more uumpf then my Medion (as it should have considering the price ). BTW, nice pano Klaus.....really cool stitching especially the gritted floor in the nadir....nice photoshop work, but you wore lucky the grits weren't curved as well....then you would have been in dire straights without a nadir....in this case I would have shot a nadir (just to keep a sortoff fallback position when everything else fails). But you carried it off quite okay, quite okay indeed.

What I've noticed by the way is that more pictures slows down APP more then more megapixels.....your 4 Mpixel sphere with 144 frames of the 5D (21 Mpixel) will render faster then my 2.4 Mpixel sphere containing 246 frames of my GF1 (12 Mpixel), now that is logical since I need way more CP's then you, but something to consider when buying a next camera, hence the D600 (nice compromise camera for those who think 36 Mpixel is a bit south of the advisable pixelsize or bank account (<- my objection to the D800 allthough I consider it worth every penny you have to have the pennies first)).

Having said that I also will have to invest in 2 8 Mbyte DRR3 Ram modules, but those are not a big financial bump in the road (luckyly) and more webspace....which is more of a hassle.....

Greets, Ed.

Eh, blush.....stupid me.....GPixel it is.......

Greets, Ed.