Render Heads
PressX
Working! New
This is for you guys who use 3D MAX.
I Have a customer who is looking for a new rig and is a heavy 3d max user (He creates visuals from plans for developers). He has asked me to spec a PC for around £1000 / $1800 that can be used as a workstation but also for rendering. Now I have never used 3d Max in anger. Is it memory or CPU that does the hard work? or Both. I suspect it will be memory but need to know what other people think? Do I build AMD or Intel (would prefer not to go Intel) do I go dual Procs or spend the extra on loads of mem? Is the a Linux build that can render? This may make better use of AMD64?
So any thoughts from this knowledgeable community?
TYIA
Marcus
I Have a customer who is looking for a new rig and is a heavy 3d max user (He creates visuals from plans for developers). He has asked me to spec a PC for around £1000 / $1800 that can be used as a workstation but also for rendering. Now I have never used 3d Max in anger. Is it memory or CPU that does the hard work? or Both. I suspect it will be memory but need to know what other people think? Do I build AMD or Intel (would prefer not to go Intel) do I go dual Procs or spend the extra on loads of mem? Is the a Linux build that can render? This may make better use of AMD64?
So any thoughts from this knowledgeable community?
TYIA
Marcus
0
Comments
Hope that helps.
EDIT// And as for the memory and Dual processor stuff, I would go for Dual Processor. Memory does help, but if you're main importance is Rendering, go Dual Processor.
I think all of this will push past your budget though....so you could always go for a a64-fx53 with like 2gb of ram and a middle-of-the-road DCC video card. Below is a rough estimate...
$900 mobo and cpu
$500 ram
$500 dcc video card
__________
$1800
I basically do what he does, the majority of 3DSMAX relies on processor power as well as memory. Here would be my recommendations:
Bare minimum for 1 gig-o-ram, 2 would be best but that could get costly, atleast leave him room to add more memory if he needs it.
Nvidia graphics card (ATis have conflictions with 3DSMAX, my Radeon 9800 pro gets sluggish at around 200,000 polys yet my old Geforce 2 GTS stayed stable when I was doing an animation in late winter at 800,000 polygons. I haven't tried the 6800 for 3DSMAX yet, I don't know many people who have. I hear very good things about the Quadro all the time.
Processor is going to be the meat of the system, I currently run on an Athlon XP 1800+ and it has been very stable and fast for me. Lots of rendering nodes work of off dual Xeons in the corporate manwhore stations, and is a very popular choice. I would recommend AMD in my experience, I've never heard any stability problems at all from the people who use it, whereas I've heard lots of people complain about their Intel product being too hot, too sluggish, too taboo, whatever. I guess the choice is if you want to stick with the old AMD series or move up to the 64 bit series. This is really going to test your budget if you go AMD 64, and it will be faster, but he may not be buying Win 64 immediately when it comes out (Whenever the hell that is). As of right now, 3DS MAX is not 64 bit compatible, and the OS as well as the program must be compatible to take advantage of it. 3DS MAX 7, which will be shown at Siggraph in a little bit, is unknown if it will be 64 bit compatible. Even if it was, he probably won't rush out and go upgrade for another $3,000, and if he is using a 3rd party rendering system, then he definately will not be upgrading. Hyperthreading is also important.
*Edit*
4 gig is overkill, you start loosing the usefullness of RAM after about 2 gigs, after that it's just pissing in the wind.
I would say try as hard as you can to cram dual processors into that budget somewhere. A minimum of a gig ram, to be sure, but duallies make a huge difference in rendering.
I meant it is an important thing to weigh in, a local friend of mine said enabling hyperthreading in 3DSMAX increased his render speeds by 10-15%, but I don't know if it was faster than his AMD processor (They, like I did, renderd an animation on a mixed render farm of anything they could get that turned on basically) I would suggest going AMD, but the choice is yours between an AMD 64 that may never get its full use, and a dual AMD system, which will get good use.
nVidia video cards are the way to go for 3D graphics work. They're one of the industry leaders in video cards for enterprise modelling applications. No one knows why ATI doesn't work very well, but nVidia does excellently.
Hyperthreading? Yes, it's important... However, dual Opterons equivalent to any Xeon will A) Be cheaper and B) Be faster. The 64 bit doesn't matter so much as it's just <b>considerably faster than any other processor in existence.</b>
Right, but what I'm considering is the fact that for the extra money, would he see the benefit from it, a considerable benefit without the 64 bit applications.
Dual Opterons
2GB Ram
Nvidia GPU
The proc does a lot of work, while memory is important going over the top (>2GB) is not needed.
I will price it up and see what my customer says. I suspect it will be out of his budget. UK prices are higher and it would be the same as building it for $1000... But I will try
Thanks for the replies. I hoped this would generate a good response
Besides, I am getting tired of crashing in games... this card seems to be dieing :P
Poor OpenGL drivers are the reason that nVidia crushes ATI in professional 3d applications
It's not so much that either, I tried running on Direct 3D for awhile and it was still craptacular.
I was told by my teacher that if you use a Radeon Card that you should run 3D Max under DirectX 8 and not 9 due to this same reason. I haven't tried it yet though :P
If you're shopping from $200 - $500 then I'd say go with the FX500-700.
FX500 (128bit) is considered entry level and FX700 (256 bit) mid-range ...by nvidia of course.
Of course if it were me I'd be leaning towards a Wildcat.
http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20040811/index.html
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=105&var2=0
140 opteron render farm plus 60 other individual workstations! WOW! That is awesome!
I work with Softimage which is 3DStudio Max's rather large and scary uncle.
Everyone is correct here in saying that the 3D modelling programs are CPU intensive for rendering out a single or multiple pict sequence. (Images). The GPU for OpenGL or Direct3D is mainly relied upon for manipulating the model. EG: spinning it about then redrawing it's framework.
The rest of it is 2D.
It is worth it to get the 3D Professional cards mainly for the specific driver support. There isn't so much of a hardware difference between Nvidia products, for example. It's in the driver set and what is/isn't enabled on the hardware side of the card.
I, myself, haven't run into a situation where something couldn't be done on a 9800 PRO vs the FIREGL. But I know it's lurking out there somewhere.
Best case...dual processors as recommended.
Best case...professional workstation ATI or NVIDIA card. Most favor NVIDIA.
Best case...2 GB of RAM...1 is fine.
We use a Quadro 750 XGL and it works just fine. Not that expensive but hard to get.