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32bit or 64bit


nisus
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Depends on how much RAM. I've done some tests on a machine that had 32 and 64 installed with 2GB, and found negligible speed differences, but with over 3GB 64-bit avoids the "3GB switch" hassles and you need it to go over 4GB. If it's 14 vs. 9 with an amount of memory 32-bit can habdle, and all other things being equal, 14 is more than 9.

 

You'll want Backburner because Raysat won't handle that many nodes.

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With 4GB... maybe you'd benefit in speed, but I think you'd need to hear from somebody who's had the opportunity to test on a 4GB system. One benefit would be avoiding the 3GB switch, which a lot of people have had issues with.

 

The part about Raysat - mental ray's distributed bucket render system (AKA Raysat) works with up to 8 nodes simultaneously on one frame, but Backburner is unlimited, so say you had a 14-node farm, you could divide it in half and have Backburner sends Raysat jobs to each half (I think this works if you give half the computers the one set of IP addresses in their Raysat configs and the other half, the other half of the addresses, and then have Backburner send jobs to one machine per half) or just have Backburner use one machine per frame if you're animating. With 8 or fewer nodes you could run the render on your lead machine with distributed turned on and slave the other nodes to it when you want to make 1 frame go faster.

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If you go 64bit on any of your machines, you'll have to go 64 bit on all of them if you want to network render. We just discovered that issue. We bought xp64 workstations and installed 64 bit Max, which isn't compatible with 32 bit Max on regular xp workstations.

 

Has anyone else had this experience? I've been wondering how well the 32bit and 64bit versions would play with one another.

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Hi,

 

Yeah, we have the same prob: 32 and 64 don't run together...

 

For the raysat: As far as I have seen in max8/32b we did not had a real benefit with DBR (what you call raysat). That's why I have not been using this. With the proxies this IS something to check for of course!

 

As far as I know: one really benefits from lot's of ram with MR. On a 32b system, I have to limit MR to about 1536Mb of ram without framebuffer to have 'fast' results. Not limiting the amount of ram simply eats A LOT rendertime. Making scenes that don't use the limited memory (consume less than 1536Mb) of ram are really fast. Proxies help reduce the amount of bitmap loading/unloading and ram quite a bit, but for architectural projects (and large outputs) one really also needs high-res bitmaps... On 64bit systems, it is especially here that I hope to find relief: i.e. less loading/unloading of bitmaps in really large scenes.

 

Does anyone has any experience about this?

 

rgds,

 

nisus

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