New wave of technology is costing a fortune.

[Sketchrender]

May be it is just me but has anybody else found that to stay in the viz game from this year on is going to cost a hell of a lot more money?

vray is going to cost people for the 1st time granted but still its an expense.

and to take advantage you need to purchase a new graphics card or 2.

iray is going the same way and they are talking very expensive cards and mother boards to keep in the game.

 

for last few years the subscription for max and then all the plugins updates have cost enough now a major investment will be required.

am I alone in these thoughts .

I am a single person studio and clients won't see any of this but I will feel it.

 

phil

Edited October 3, 2010 by philip kelly
HTC HD2 is a shit phone for forums

[Tommy L]

I feel your pain, Im looking at a farm upgrade as mines looking a bit shabby. Im going to rinse Max Design 2010 (im not on subscription), Vray and CS4 for as long as I can though. Im happy with it and feel no urge to upgrade.

[Sketchrender]

b

I feel your pain, Im looking at a farm upgrade as mines looking a bit shabby. Im going to rinse Max Design 2010 (im not on subscription), Vray and CS4 for as long as I can though. Im happy with it and feel no urge to upgrade.

 

well my point is that client will get the same quality and he won't know anything about the cost of all the upgrading one had done.

twinmotion may be worth iinvesting in as it is a new production line and end product nut that all depends on price too.

[Macer]

Yep, expensive! I was looking into i-ray and was disappointed by the scene size / memory size restriction for gpu usage. Most of my scenes are over 2GB in RAM consumption so I’m guessing that my GPUs wouldn’t even be used for most scenes. Graphics cards with more than 2GB RAM aren’t cheap!

 

But then when I went to download the subscription advantage pack during the week, I found out that the account has been temporarily suspended because my employer is still haggling over the £2million + subscription bill!

 

So there’s no chance of hardware upgrades when all the money is being blown on software!

[AJLynn]

Philip, try to think on the other side of the cost/benefit. If it's true that the client won't notice a difference in the deliverable then the new tech is useful only if it enable you to work more quickly and do more projects (and of course, you have enough market to get the extra projects).

 

Meanwhile, the prices on cards with more than 2GB is artificially inflated because they're specialty products (Quadros and two models of Radeon, one of which is so specialty it comes in a case shaped like a machine gun) but in the next month or so ATI will start rolling out Radeon 6000 series cards which will include under-$1000 4GB models. nVidia will have no choice but to counter, to keep pace in the higher volume gamer market, and if there aren't 4GB Geforce cards some time next year at the $500 price point (with an ATI competitor at $400-500 of course) I'll be very surprised. RAM is too cheap (making video card RAM too high margin) for them not to do it. Meanwhile, 28nm process GPUs are in the roadmap, as is Vray RT for ATI, which will be very good for this market, GPU rendering is nowhere near being mature enough to be a must-have.

 

Meanwhile, affordable CPUs continue to improve. AMD just shipped a $240 3.0GHz 6-core, Intel is going to have to respond with a mainstream 6-core next year. They're already on schedule to launch the Nehalem successor for socket 1156 in January, which will include a 3.4GHz quad i7 at 95W.

 

So don't panic. If you don't see the newer technology being profitable for you yet, just sit back, wait, and let the early adopters pay the high prices and find the bugs.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

EDIT: Take what I am posting with a grain of salt. It is bad to post about things you haven't fully tested, but this is my gut reaction...

 

_______________________

 

I work for a large firm so we are on subscription or other terms for most of our updates, including hardware, though there is some reflectance to buy more expensive video cards.

 

...but the reason I am posting is that up until this point all of my work can be completed with Max9, Production Studio CS3, and the latest version of Vray. Even though those are not the versions I use on a daily basis. We tested the waters in Mental Ray, but after a little more than a year we were still not getting the same production speeds that we were with Vray.

 

I have a bit concerned with the direction software from several different companies have taken over the last couple of years. They are being developed more, workflows are changing, and interfaces are changing for what is perceived to be better, but often it seems to result in slower software. Or at least it feels slower to me... Sometimes these things are difficult to benchmark and test to be sure if what I am feeling is actually true.

 

I have a help ticket in with our IT department to get Iray installed for testing. I am intrigued, but I am wondering how much I will be able to use it in production. The vast majority of my scenes consume far more ram than what an affordable video card can hold.

 

Even though I have not tested Iray yet, there are a couple of threads on Vizdepot that have me concerned. The times people are getting are astonishingly slow. My gut reaction is that it may be far to slow for me to seriously consider using in production. We are talking Maxwell speeds, with similar quality in the same amount of time.

 

Jeff Patton managed to get 1:32 seconds on a clay render of a simple scene using a Tesla 2050 and a GTX470. I downloaded the file and did an equivalent clay render with Vray 1.5 and it took 35 seconds including both GI calculation and rendering. I got it down to 22 seconds, but the AA was not as nice as what Jeff had so I upped it some.

 

To keep this somewhat on topic, those two video cards together will run you roughly $2,500.

 

This has me concerned that we are going down the road further of having software that is to advanced for what our current hardware is. But like I said, I have not tested it yet, so my gut reaction could be off.

 

Iray speed tests...

http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10291&page=1&pp=15

Iray -vs - Maxwell...

http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10293

Edited October 3, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[ihabkal]

iray is still new technology, I think when Nvidia and Autodesk sat down and decided to do it they were thinking 5 years down the line whith hardware that is 10x cheaper and 10x faster than what we have. When I look at iray I find it unuseful to me for rendering as the star trek plastic model is unuseful for space travel. But I feel that with time it might become a standard. But this 5+ years time will also be given to Vray developers and they would probalby be light years ahead of Nvidia and Autodesk by then.

[Sketchrender]

My worry would be that they are pushing software that we use ie max in a direction that you will have to use high end cards to do the job you could do with a standard card.

The material editor is a point in case.

It is decided for you.........who asked them to change it..................

Don't fix it if it is not broken............

 

I can't see myself getting any thing new for a while as work is dead over in ireland at the present.

 

As I said if Twinmotion works out to be chaep i will use it.

 

Phil

[elliottsmith]

It's an interesting point. I've been testing both V-Ray RT GPU beta and iray since they have been available and there do seem to be differences between the two that make an impact on what hardware is required.

 

Vray gives you the option to globally throttle the size of your textures so that your scene will fit onto the graphics card. With iray, if it doesn't fit onto the card it will only utilise the CPU, which i've found to be painfully slow (admittedly I haven't done as much testing with iray). On the flip side, you can use proxies with iray and I would hope you can do the same with vray, although they aren't currently supported in the GPU beta.

 

 

The cost of hardware will depend on your typical scene, and like Andrew said, ATI will be rolling out much more affordable 4GB cards next month or so (which wont work with iray) and then hopefully Nvidia will follow. Andrew, do you know how many processor cores they will have, whether they will have a gamer amount or a pro card amount?

 

With regards to the cost of the software, iray, whilst only available to subs holders, will mostly likely be included with Max 2012. So, if your not on subs it'll cost you £400 odd to get it now, which will be the cheapest way to get it and also means you will get Max 2012.

 

 

There are upgrade paths for vray, if you have it already, it'll be about £350.

 

 

So, all in all it looks like you could get either a vray or iray GPU solution for about £800 ($1250), split evenly between the software upgrade and a next gen ATI or Nvidia 4GB gamer card.

 

 

For a one off purchase I guess it will probably be worth it, but it's a tricky one.

[ihabkal]

For a one off purchase I guess it will probably be worth it, but it's a tricky one.

 

Yeah I am hearing good news about the economy in the UK, but not many artists can afford the luxury of forking out $1500 to try a new rendering solution, especially that (I guess) we are happy with Vray as it is (aren't we?)

[AJLynn]

Elliott, the ATI 4GB cards are supposed to be on track for December and the GPU are something like 1700 or 1900 cores (yet again I raise my objection to that word for this) but don't read so much into that because ATI uses larger numbers of simpler cores than nVidia. Also, it would be incorrect to say that a "pro" card has more cores. A pro card is a gamer card with some specific added capabilities (much of which is achieved in firmware and drivers - for economy there is as little differentiation as possible in the more complex parts). The Quadro 6000 is a Geforce 480 with more memory and some added peripheral features but a lower GPU clock. The 5000 is the same way relative to the Geforce 465 and the 4000 has no exact equivalent because there's no Geforce GF100 GPU as weak as the 4000's! (256 "cores")

 

But, assuming ATI and Chaosgroup work out whatever their issue is by then, a 4GB Radeon 6000 series might be very good for Vray RT-GPU.

[eagle_ear]

sketchup + paint = free

yeah right

[BVI]

I feel your pain, Im looking at a farm upgrade as mines looking a bit shabby. Im going to rinse Max Design 2010 (im not on subscription), Vray and CS4 for as long as I can though. Im happy with it and feel no urge to upgrade.

 

Hey Tom - be careful with that strategy, you can't just resume an Autodesk subscription and expect to get a new version in the future. You will need to pay a crossgrade or worse legacy upgrade fee which can be as much as a new license to get to the latest version. Its cheaper to stay on subscription than deal with that headache in two years.

[Tommy L]

Hey Tom - be careful with that strategy, you can't just resume an Autodesk subscription and expect to get a new version in the future. You will need to pay a crossgrade or worse legacy upgrade fee which can be as much as a new license to get to the latest version. Its cheaper to stay on subscription than deal with that headache in two years.

 

Ive never had a subscription. To be honest Im waiting until a $50k job comes along then Ill burn half the profits on new gear. Until then 2010 will do.

[BVI]

Ive never had a subscription. To be honest Im waiting until a $50k job comes along then Ill burn half the profits on new gear. Until then 2010 will do.

 

Sounds good to me!

[Tommy L]

In fact I dont really use 2010 any different than I used 2008. Or Viz 2004 or whatever it was.