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Multiprocessor rendering solution: Advice needed


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What is the best multiprocessor solution for architectural 3d rendering?

 

Budget around € 25 000.

 

It comes to mind renderdrive but we lose radiosity and vray GI.

We would like to have something like a dedicated rack server with a pile of processors for use in our company (6 modelers/animators). Is there any comparable solution to renderdrive with similar or better performance/cost?

 

Thanks for your time

 

Reyner

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when you are using vray, what about a renderfarm with several "normal" machines ? the DR in vray is very good and will be nearly perfect in the near future (release 1.1). you can use all of your machines (no limit) to render a single picture or an animtion, works great !! i think for € 25.000 you can have a lot of machines for your renderfarm :)

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How is cg work going in Dublin now, busy? I am trying to live through a college course there at the moment. There is someone in Dublin already using a render drive or two isn't there? Archimage or Grafx? I did a bit of work for MOLAs a while back, and there was one cg company there sending us alot of pr brochures with stuff done using renderdrive.

 

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/platforms/index-bl.html

 

http://www.atnextcom.com/

 

http://www.rlx.com/about/about_testimonials.php

 

This would be the other alternative, i think - very compact, quite cheap, scalable, rack-mountable...

 

I think they can almost put 4 cpus on each blade nowadays. The cpus, of course would be special low power version of Pentium 4 to fit in such small tiny spaces.

 

I think blades mostly use laptop sized hard drives, but deciding upon the best solution is really a matter of the easiest software to maintain.

 

Sun currently seem very advanced in the blade world, but i think that is solaris mostly. But you might be able to get a better 'feel' for type of solution blade is - nice web casts etc. Sun always make an effort. They recently lost their contract with Pixar though.

 

http://www.sun.com/bignews/

 

[ April 30, 2003, 10:11 AM: Message edited by: garethace ]

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Originally posted by nunez:

It comes to mind renderdrive but we lose radiosity and vray GI.

Have you tried the Renderdrive? I would seriously ask them to demo it, and even let you use one for a week or two before investing in one... They let us try one, and we found that a dual 1ghz with vray was far outperforming the renderdrive even with GI (which the renderdrive does not have)... renderdrive=$25,000... dual 1ghz renderslave (at the time)=$2,500...

 

That was a while ago... things may have changed.

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Thought might like to know that rendrive are currently working on a gi solution. I was Beta testing it last year and the initial results were encoraging, even on the pure card. Give them a ring to find out how far they are with it.
I would imagine to use a renderdrive PCI version, then your system would really have to be up to spec then. Not much point in throwing the old renderdrive card into just any old box.

 

If going for a Vray renderdrive PCI card, first talk to people who use compositing boards such as doing from DPS and Targa 2000. That is on the type of system required to run those cards.

 

Probably best to buy the whole system from a good graphics workstation oem with the card installed.

 

We use one of these

 

http://www.rendercube.com/

Geez, VP6s - now there is a blast from the past! :angerazz: I can remember just drooling over those way back in PIII days.

 

[ May 02, 2003, 11:41 AM: Message edited by: garethace ]

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