Dual Core G5's Works Wonders On 3D Graphics Render

unimatrix

Nov 8 2005, 03:20 AM

We just added six new Dual Core G5 Macs at our office. Each system is like having 4x2.3Ghz chips and the systems scream. Three went to our 3D animation (lightwave 3d Users) and the other three to video editing/rendering tasks.

These things scream and the price tag wasn't too bad either (3500 each). Light wave folks picked up 55% performance boost rendering their output and the FCP editors love the systems. They don't have to send their smaller tasks to the Grid anymore, they can render in their booth while taking a long lunch, or midnight snack in some cases. That's good news because then it frees up our Xgrid for other tasks such as Screamernet (lightwave network rendering engine).

I wish I had one, but I got the two intel developer's boxes so I guess its even...

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the empty calorie

Nov 8 2005, 10:13 AM

I'd love to get a hold of one of these dual-core systems...I'd take it over the Intel Developer box..for now at least. Or maybe just to say "This is the last PPC Power Mac model that was made" for historic purposes.

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twitch

Nov 8 2005, 06:38 PM

I would love a super-computer (1024 racks of 3.2GHz processors), but they come at a price of 1/2 million and no GUI OS works on them, only IBM OS.

For design, personally I like the strength of those systems, however the structure of Mac is a little to be said for.

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yungblood

Nov 8 2005, 10:49 PM

QUOTE(guy @ Nov 8 2005, 11:38 AM)

I would love a super-computer (1024 racks of 3.2GHz processors), but they come at a price of 1/2 million and no GUI OS works on them, only IBM OS.

For design, personally I like the strength of those systems, however the structure of Mac is a little to be said for.

I wonder if you could find a port of linux that runs on them. I know that there are linux ports to all kinds of unusual systems.

If I had the money to spend on super-computing, I would probably use racks of blades running linux. For 3D rendering, all you really need is fast processors, and plenty of memory for each one. So I would have all the blades tied to a server with a fast scsi-raid of hdd's. And of course, I would have the whole thing networked with fiber-optic. Then I would have my controlling computer running linux with X. I would have the whole system use the concept of grid computing.

I have done some playing with POV animation, and know how nice it would be to have the processing power to make it quick. It took me over an hour to render all the frames for my spinning logo, and then combine them into an animated .gif. Most of the time was the rendering. To see the outcome, take a look at http://games.yungblood.com and look at the dice in the top left hand corner that spells out "games."

-YungBlood

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the empty calorie

Nov 10 2005, 03:22 AM

I know there is a port of Slackware to the IBM S/390 Architecture..
I myself would be more inclined to use BSD if possible. That would be nice, OpenBSD running on a system with about 1024 POWER5 processors..

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