Rendering Processors: AR350 vs AMD vs P4? 21
landrau asks: "I'm planning on building a render farm and was wondering whether anyone would know the pros and cons of the AR350 processor, used in The Renderdrive, as opposed to building a renderfarm with an AMD or P4 processor." While the Renderdrive looks like a real rendering workhorse that can produce some gorgeous results (see images in page header), does it justify its lofty pricetag of £6950 (over $12,300USD)?
Alphastations (Score:4, Interesting)
Included renderer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Be sure to count the price of your rendering software into your comparrison. The price of Renderman and it's associated support could well make up the difference in your hardware costs. Don't forget to include the price of your install time (man-hours) as well.
Vanilla hardware (Score:5, Informative)
I have never tested or looked at the render drive, the price seemed a tad high.
I would rather be able to do several frames at a time than one frame really fast.
I imagine the AMD64 based solutions will be nice farm boxes as well. Rendering is so IO intensive, having a wider, faster memory bus has to help.
-Tim
Re:Vanilla hardware (Score:2)
Depends on what he's using to render with, really. Frankly, I don't think AMD's 64-bit processor will be all that interesting to use for rendering until the renderer is optimized for it. You don't really get a speed boost from using 32-bit code on a 64-bit processor.
Re:Vanilla hardware (Score:5, Informative)
The AMD64 systems have faster memory access than the Pentium based systems. Its comperable to the bus on Apple's G5 (AMD and Apple worked together on it).
-Tim
Re:Vanilla hardware (Score:2)
I apologize, I was running two ideas together and communicated them poorly. I don't think the memory bus is making that significant of difference with rendering. If it was, there would (potentially...) be a larger difference between the P4's and the Athlons when rendering. True, lots of data has to be pulled from RAM to the processor to perform calculations on, but the big bottleneck seems to be in
Re:Vanilla hardware (Score:2)
The rest of it depends on what other bottle necks you have... obviously. Also scene size and complexity. I know that having as much stuff as close to the processor as possible always pays off. I am also going by what I have been told, I could be off.
The other big bonus for the AMD64 systems is more memory. I hate hitting swap.
Its been a while since I have wo
I dunno about Renderdrive.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You should examine, though, what your needs are and think about whether or not the limitations of the RD would really be a BFD to you or not.
So.. unless the RD is really what you're after, that leaves AMD and Intel. Frankly, this is a tough call. The deciding factor may very well be the renderer you use. AMD's done a real nice job of keeping the render speed per dollar ratio nice and affordable. Intel, however, has a few tricks under the hood that some 3D apps make really good use of. Hyperthreading really muddies the waters as well. For the longer more detailed scenes, I've seen a good deal of benefit from using Hyperthreading on a P4 via Lightwave. Although, for smaller scenes, the overhead of setting up multiple threads can often defeat the purpose of using HT.
Yeah, I know, not a very helpful answer. I think if you went AMD, you'd see a price savings, and not lose a whole heck of a lot of performance. At least that's the direction I'd go. However, I wouldn't buy either until I've taken a typical scene from my 3D app and performed a benchmark analysis on either of the two processors. I mean do this first hand, don't read the benchmark sites, they can be very misleading.
Fun stuff. Truth be told, though, I think you'll go with either one and find times where you ache for the other. Grass is always greener?
AR350 (Score:3, Interesting)
-psy
Re:AR350 (Score:3, Insightful)
If they are getting that kind of speed out of an FPGA, they would be a bunch of complete stupid idiots not to develop it on into silicon. The speed advantage alone would probably put them on top of the market instantly. Heck, they could probably even offer realtime rendering at broadcast tv resolutions. Also keep in mind that FPGA's with enough gates to actually do this kind of thing cost a heck of a lot more than 12K.
Not that this kind of thing isn't coming.. I would assume that realti
Re:AR350 (Score:4, Informative)
*cough*
Actually, the advantage of using FPGAs over ASICs would pertain to reconfigurable computing.
Send me a link to an FPGA devise that costs more than 12K
-psy
Re:AR350 (Score:2)
If you ask politely I'll even throw in a Digilab DI01 for free.
But you have to pay shipping and handeling.
Deal?
Yes they did.. (Score:5, Informative)
Renderdrive images are AMAZING! (Score:5, Funny)
A mirror of these spectacular images can be seen here:
http://www.dashpc.com/renderdrive_mirror.png
You did go to NAB, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Otherwise, lots of people with software that farmed out rendering to clusters of commodity blade servers. The dual CPU 1U x86-64 was a screamer, though not as compact as some of the other arrangements I saw.
Better shop around a bit more...
Go General Purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot depends on what application you plan on running. Each app has their own approach to distributed processing, and their support (or lack thereof) for any given hardware is critical.
I would lean towards AMD 64-bit CPUs at this time. Some renderers are optimized for P4, but the AMD chips seem to run P4 code quite well, and they run all other X86 code wonderfully.
You can rack up a bunch of commodity boxes for a great price, and render to your heart's content on them. In some cases, depending on support from your rendering software vendor, you might even be able to run Linux on them.
I will put in a plug here for an open-source program I created, SuperConductor (http://super-conductor.org/ [super-conductor.org] that is a multi-application portable render farm controller. It's written in Qt 3, and runs on Linux and Windows right now (no Mac Qt dev kit to try it on). It currently supports my rendering software (World Construction Set/Visual Nature Studio [3dnature.com]) but is designed to be extensible to other renderers. We could use someone to add support for Maya, POV-Ray, or other apps. The freshest source (a complete rewrite) is in SourceForge CVS right now!
Gelato (Score:5, Informative)
On another note, I haven't been keeping up with my 3D like I used to, but some software, such as Renderman, can do distributed rendering on a single frame, and then automagically merge the results. I don't think Brazil offers this yet (could be wrong?), but they're working on it (under the name of Banshee, bottom of page [splutterfish.com]. If your renderer of choice offers such a feature, you could build some serious distributed rendering for $12k.
Re:Gelato (Score:2)
-Tim
G5s (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought we were talking about bang for the buck? (Score:3, Funny)