Computer Speeds Need rough ideas for diferent mach. renderti

Shaun Tennant · 28 Dec 2007, 17:38

Hey guys, I am always looking at computers for my renderfarm, but I'm PC based, sometimes Mac's come up for free, or for a little bit of cash, but I don't know what kinds of speeds comparatively they would be - I think Jeff Jacobs has a great idea (unfortunately I have deleted the PM you sent me with your cross-mac times on different machines)
I would greatly appreciate it if you could give me a processor speed and a file that you tried - how long it took, and then the same file that you tested on a different machine (either mac or PC - doesn't matter - I like numbers.) Please mention if it's a laptop - heat dissapation can make the numbers for a laptop not look quite as good.

I'll start with some numbers:
Using an animation that I just ran that was as complex as heck, one frame:
My Opteron 170 dual core (at 2.02 Ghz) took about 6 minutes
My AMD TurionX2 Laptop 1.66 Ghz dual Core took about 8.5 minutes
My Celeron 2800 took about 27 minutes
My p4 1.6 Ghz Dells took about 52 minutes.
My p4 1.0 and 965Mhz Dells took also about 52 minutes (I found that very strange - but it tests out on my machines all the time)

Using the Celeron 2800 (yech!) as the benchmark, I could think that:
the Opteron is about 4.5 times faster
The Laptop is about 3.17 times faster
The 1.6 and 1.0 P4's are about 1.92 times slower.

I would never spend the time picking up a P3 or 4 500mhz, but I saw a G4 lately for 150.00 that was a 500mhZ - I suspect that might be more in line with the 1.0 and 1.6 Ghz PC's? Don't know, so I didn't move on it and it sold right away..I can use PC or Mac for my render nodes, so no issues there. I guess I just want to know how your machines stack up to each other, then I can get an idea after putting this all together, what roughly I should spend per/speed... thanks guys!

Shaun Tennant

jeff jacobs · 28 Dec 2007, 17:39

The render times for an identical SketchUp/modo model were:

My old 1.33GHz, G4 17", 1GB- 2hrs 20 minutes
My G5 dual 2.5GHz, 4GB- 35 minutes
New Intel MacBook Pro, 3GB -11 minutes
New 8-Core MacPro, 4GB-3 minutes

This will give you a decent ratio.

Modo is going to release a new version 301 soon. rendering to other machines is supported. I think up to 300 or something crazy like that. If you watch the video you can get the whole story.

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=17035

Maxwell's new release in the next few release is said to support as many cores as your machine has built in instead of a 2-cores per license scheme that it currently uses. That is good news for Maxwell users.

Shaun Tennant · 28 Dec 2007, 17:39

Jeff, thanks for that - so it looks like a G4 500 would be less interesting choice, I think If I could do a G4 1.5 or so, that would do, but 500.. nah.

Keep em coming - thanks in advance.

Shaun Tennant

otb designworks · 28 Dec 2007, 17:40

jeez, are you serious? 3 minutes with the 8 core?!!

drool, drool. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's 8 core mac pro............

alan wood · 28 Dec 2007, 17:40

thanks for that Jeff
alan

juju · 28 Dec 2007, 17:41

Might get my hands on a Dell Precision Worksation 530 (1.7GHz XEON, 2x 256MB RD RAM) soon. Will let you know how it compares with my current machine (P4 Northwood, 3.4GHz, 2x 512MB DDR low latency). Hopefully I'll be able to get another CPU and some more RAM for the Dell, but I think it'll be as scarce as hens' teeth, especially the RD RAM. Hoping to use it purely for rendering.