Preserved Topic: Speed of the rendering engines... (Page 1 of 1)

first off thanks to Das for his excellent summary of the 3D pgms. it needs to be placed somewhere so everyone coming in can view or review it...

my question, since i am poor and can only afford Bryce4 and it is So Slow to render...i am curious if it would be faster with the new pentium IV chip that is not on the market...or is the engine the engine and that is life..

cb

correction...

pentium IV chip that is Now on the market..

The new pentium IV is crap as far as I'm concerned. You can buy a 1.2 or 1.3 GHz Athlon for much less money, and it kills the Pentium 4 across the board. As for rendering speed, I would imagine it simply scales up or down depending on the chip's properties. Rendering with Bryce on a P4 will still be slower than rendering with Lightwave, etc on a P4.

Yeah, the P4's at their current MHz just suck for 99% of the applications out there. There isn't anythng specifically written for them to make them faster, and they do run current software slower than a lower clocked P3.

If you are wanting to render faster you want something with killer floating point calculations, the AMD chips just completely rock intel at this. Plus tey are so much cheaper

Bryce though.. I don't think it really matters what speed your CPU is, it's a dog for rendering. If it's all you can afford it looks like you are stuck with slow render times.

-Electro

thanks guys

Unfortunaley for me, who uses high end modellers and renderers on a regular basis, programs like Maya and Softimage don't support AMDs and so will not work with them, so i am stuck with my pentium 3.

I was a bit nervous about my high-end software not working on Athlons myself, so I upgraded to a P4 just recently. 1.3Ghz Dell.

The P4 isn't nearly as bad as you might have heard. Its performance is comperable to a Athlon of the same speed; a little slower in many tasks, but not much. It's a little faster in some tasks as well. The penalty with going Intel is the massive price differential, which I was willing to pay for compatibility.

If I was interested mainly in games or low-end apps, I'd definitely go with AMD, but it's not worth the risk of a major piece of software not getting along with the AMD CPU. Heck, Max alone costs more than the $2400 the computer set me back (including monitor - I needed another one).

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Unfortunaley for me, who uses high end modellers and renderers on a regular basis, programs like Maya and Softimage don't support AMDs and so will not work with them, so i am stuck with my pentium 3.

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According to what? What doesn't it support? I always wonder about all this theoretical incompatibility I hear about, I've got an Athlon 800 and run Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and LightWave over 8 hours a day and I've never had a compatibility problem. I have yet to meet anyone with an actual instance of a program not working...

Chris

KAIROSinteractive

[This message has been edited by Fig (edited 03-20-2001).]

Mental Ray doesn't get along with the Athlon, according to the support board. I wouldn't be surprised if Maya and RenderMan are only Intel friendly, as well. Most consumer software is developed and tested against a lot of hardware configurations, but non-consumer niche software like Maya and Mental Ray are developed under the assumption that they're going to be used in large companies on standard hardware. Renderers especially tend to assume that they're running on big multi-CPU servers, in a render farm. Mental Ray won't even run on Win98/ME; it requires WinNT or Win2k.

I might consider AMD in the future if their future processors are as well behaved as the Athlon, but earlier AMD chips have had serious issues with a lot of software of all types. I've heard many reports on game support boards, for example, that lead me to believe that (pre-Athlon) AMDs can have serious compatibility problems when combined with other hardware (i.e. such and such a game won't work with K6 and GeForce2, etc.).

Even then, I'd have to wait and see if my niche software works on it before I'd commit to the purchase.

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I've got an Athlon 800 and run Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and LightWave over 8 hours a day and I've never had a compatibility problem.

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That could be becuase all of those support the AMD, but the High end renderers like Maya and Softimage don't...at least, not as well. They don't like the Athalons...but they love the pentiums (this being becuase Softimage and Maya both have sponsorship contracts with Intel, and not AMD).

So...I'm fucked for the AMD's




Computer Senility. I had a friend once who had it. His name was Gilbert, but he prefered it if people called him 'Ramases Niblick the third...Kerplunk, Kerplunk, Whoops! Wheres my thribble?'... - Kryton, Red Dwarf.

Thanks for the info guys. Personally I'll take LW's renders over most other software, and the fact they've written Maya exporters to LW's render engine tells me some other folks feel the same way as well

And i hate retarded corporate cash stuff that's bad for the consumer

Chris

KAIROSinteractive

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Personally I'll take LW's renders over most other software

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Well, of course. As I indicated in my other post, the renderers available rank (in features and image quality):
1 - RenderMan (PRMan) - used for Star Wars:Episode I, The Mummy, A Bug's Life, etc, etc, etc.
2 - Mental Ray - used for The Cell, Judge Dredd, The City of the Lost Children, Godzilla, etc, etc, etc
3 - Lightwave - used in just about every sci-fi TV show currently made

Everything else is a pretty distant stretch behind LW. The 'price is no object' studios almost always go Maya + PRMan, but Maya + LW is a very viable cheaper solution, especially for TV (it doesn't scale that well to film resolutions).