dharmaone

The consumer version of Rift is going to come out pretty soon, within 6 months I'd say. They just scored $70m of venture capital which should help speed things up. I had been looking at similar stuff using Unity, would love to hear reasons why you went with Vizard instead? Your demos looked good. I'm guessing you are baking all the GI niceness on the textures?

man, that's some great data, thanks! What improvements would you recommend if I were to spend £100-300 more? (from skinflint). Maybe a haswell hackintosh compatible mobo too?

would this do if I pop a gtx760 in there? http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FSDOBK4/ I don't mind building from parts, but definitely can't match this price for an i7 build

what mATX/miniITX case/mobo would you recommend Juraj?

I had a look at the Dells yesterday, looked pretty good. I'd rather run OSX (I edit a fair bit of ProRes/raw .dng footage and sometimes use Logic for audio/music), but otherwise the Dells look superior in terms of hardware, and price. I need a new laptop in any case, currently stuck on Core 2 Duo macbook pro. I carry mine everyday so needs to be lightweight, the main use is for Photoshop/After Effects, but I thought if I can get one that can also do 3D, I would cover all use cases with one machine. Seems we are still not there with the hardware. I might do what you suggest and build a separate low cost desktop PC for rendering. What GPU would you recommend? does GTX670 still offer the best bang for buck? PS. Juraj, Your renders look great and your Corona thread is very interesting - how are you finding the speed vs Vray?

Is anyone using one of the new macbook pro retinas (15" with i7 and 2gb gt750m) for rendering (on bootcamp, 3dsmax and vray)? Opinions on how it works and render speed (compared to desktop workstation)?

just noticed that you can install windows 2012 server on these for £17/month. Their cheapest i7 (2.66ghz bloomfield 24gb ram) is £30/month, so for £47/month I could have an i7 windows server. Would 3ds max Vray render nodes be possible to set up on this setup?

Is it possible to get a vray render node up and running on a linux server? I'm thinking about renting one of these anyway for a web dev playground http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/ Would like to use it occasionally to help with the speed of my vray renders. The machines have really high specs (up to 8 cores, shitloads of RAM), decent prices (under £100 a month), and you pay monthly - so if you don't need it later you're not tied in to a contract Any thoughts?

Interesting. I had never considered ATI or AMD before but looking at a 7950 build with a fx8-8350, 990fx mobo and 16gb ram with case/psu comes to about £700. The gtx670/i7-4770 build I put together was a couple of hundred more. Gut instinct is telling me to go with Intel but maybe it's worth considering other options too

It'd be remote only when I'm not at home - which is about 50% of the time. When I'm home, I'd use it as my main workstation. Why the 670? Relatively low price (£200 for 4gb) and should be good enough for boosting After Effects, 3ds max viewport and (hopefully?) Vray RT. Would the 670 be good enough for VrayRT GPU rendering or will I get a better result with good old CPU rendering on the i7?

Gotta love the internet for answers from people who know their stuff. Very well argued answers from numerobis and Dimitris. I would like a server PC that's on 24/7 anyway, so I'll probably get a macbook, £800-900 custom PC and use the PC as a remote rendering machine if I'm not working at home. I'm pretty sure I'll get a 4gb gtx670 and i7-4770, What mobo would you recommend? Perhaps even something that might work with hackintosh/mavericks in the future?

If the iGPU isn't enough there are some hacks to use desktop GPU's with a laptop.. google diy eGPU

I hope the new mbpro's will have a decent mobile GPU. otherwise there's always hacks like this

wow, the cinebench results are really close. I think I will postpone my workstation build and wait until the new macbook pro's come out...Meant to have i7-4950hq I've got a laptop stand with fans, helps with the air circulation a lot

I'm also wondering what the speed difference going from a haswell i7 laptop to a desktop i7 will be? And if something like a gtx780m laptop GPU will be sufficient for viewport/GPU rendering?