Hardware Delema Mac or PC?

[ezra]

Originally posted by RacerX


Could you be more specific about which information. I didn't know you were talking about a business (any business that is using Maya wouldn't be penny-pinching anyway), so that would leave plenty of options for used or refurbished systems (which is something that SGI deals in all the way back to at least O2s if not Indigo 2s). As for my information being out of date, maybe (but it sure looks fine from what I can see). But then again, I have been involved in this industry in one way or another for about ten years, so maybe it is your lack of experience (why else would you feel the need to ask such a question in the first place?).

Look, you don't need to get all defensive, and star attacking, that just makes you look bad. I asked the question in shock of the realization that this year we were going to have to go with PC's instead of mac's, because the gap has become so much bigger in price performance. I hinted that I was looking for someone to give me any reason not to do it. I aslo stated that I probably wasn't that clear on my intentions in that post. It was basically a last ditch effort in hopes that someone would surptise me with a solution that I may have overlooked. Call it a shot in the dark if you will, becaue I know sometimes it works. I don't have as much time as I use to look around for these deals. I've seen in the past few months dual 500 machines on dealmac.com for $1400.00 refurbished, so who know what kind of crazy stuff other may have seen. It's obvious that nothing is going to come close to the PC option for the farm, but I might be able sway the purchase of a few workstations in the Mac direction if they got some speed for the money.

As for using Maya on a Mac, that should be news to Alias|Wavefront. The current (and past) versions are only available for Irix, Window NT 4, 2000 Pro, and Linux. Does this mean you are using Linux on a Mac?

You are correct on this, we use it on both our Win2K, and Mac machines, but I sometimes forget that they release beta's to us before it's released to the public, so the Mac version is Beta. We spend so much time with the developers, that we often forget that end users don't have to software yet. It's easy to slip up on those things, because they never tell us "usually" when it's released. In the final stages of beta testing they use names like RC1, which is release cadidate 1, and RC2 and RC 3, but no final. I beleive because I think they want you to go buy the upgrade, or final.

I can only assume so because I can't figure out how you could set up a render farm using Mac OS 9 (again, assuming this is not something new that you just started doing with Mac OS X). With this new information, yes, string together a number of cheep PCs that do nothing else but the final rendering would be a great idea.

We don't just use Maya, we use Lightwave, and Cinema4D as well. We actually don't even prefer Maya, Cinema4D is the solid one of the bunch. Lightwave just has a ton of tools to pass up, and Lightwave and Cinema are very compatible in file formats. You can set up render farms with both Cinema and Lightwave in OS9. They all also run on OS X now as well, so support has been good on all three of them.

Hopefully that clears things up, and no hard feelings, I'm just sad about not being able to go with Mac's this time around, and I'm wondering if and when we'll be able to use them again.

 

[jiblet]

Hopefully when the G5s hit and 10.2 comes out Mac value will be quite a bit higher. I'm going to pick up a G5 at the first price reduction after they come out.

 

[knighthawk]

You said that you have 30 macs G3 333mhz? I assume that this render farm is computers that your co-workers don't actually use as workstations, but as grut computers to do all of the rendering. If that is the case, then by all means go out and get PCs!!! You are right when you say that you cannot justify the cost.

Personally if it were me, I would either wait for two different things... AMD to release their MP Athlons (any day now), or the nForce chipset (nVidia) to be released for Athlons. I read a very indepth review about the nForce at http://www.tomshardware.com. A basic description is that it has built-in Geforce2MX (first built-in that is as fast as a card -- but also includes AGP for future), dual channel DDR memory (doubling the speed to 4200MB/s), built-in LAN, built-in Sound that blows away EVERYTHING that Creative Labs has, AMD's HyperTransport connection between the northbridge and southbridge (giving 800MB/s transfer), and a couple other things... nVidia used the same technology that they have developed for the XBox, and are going to bring it to the PCs. If the Intel/Via court actions go in Via's favor, then the nForce may be used with the Pentium4 as well. Motherboards with the nForce should be released soon, I hope.

Then go and get G4 800 MP for the workstations! =)

 

[spike]

Firstly you should not upgrade any Macs you have. Buy new ones. Upgrades are usually not worth the money. Especially given the hardware you have.

So, are you saying you can get a system that is twice as fast as the best Apple has to offer, for a $1000?

This seems to be your assumption. And as you say you have done some tests so it is not open to argument from you point. Fair enough.

Im assuming you tested a new G4 against a new PC?

Most other "benchmarks" do not come to this conclusion. They consider the G4 to be faster per MHz than any pentium. So much so that a G4 at the same speed is almost twice as fast in some cases.


So maybe in your tests hardware wasnt the issue. Software is. And if so then you need to be talking to the developers. You say you receive all the betas etc.. so you must have a line of communication here. It could be the SW is crippled in some way or not optimised for macintosh. I dont know, I dont use this stuff.

Its a very contentious issue.

But, I have been responsible for all sorts of major corporate purchases. And in general there is really very little cost advantage to be had with PC hardware. Im talking buying Dell etc.. hardware here. Not some shoddy knocked up build it yourself box. I mean boxes with hardware warranties and on site 24/7 support etc..
(not that Dell is that great btw

I should point out this is in the UK, and I dont know what US prices are like.

Apple stuff is a bit more expensive. No argument there. But the difference is really not a consideration in most cases. If a user wants a Mac then they should have one. Maybe I've been spoilt by cash rich companies that know a happy user is a more productive user!

But if you are looking at hardware that is going to be rendering 24/7 and only that, then raw performance is a big issue for you.

So in conclusion, I dont know.
After a few too many glasses of red wine im confused!
I'll say something more usefull in the morning.

spike.

 

[ezra]

Originally posted by knighthawk
You said that you have 30 macs G3 333mhz? I assume that this render farm is computers that your co-workers don't actually use as workstations, but as grut computers to do all of the rendering. If that is the case, then by all means go out and get PCs!!! You are right when you say that you cannot justify the cost.

Personally if it were me, I would either wait for two different things... AMD to release their MP Athlons (any day now), or the nForce chipset (nVidia) to be released for Athlons. I read a very indepth review about the nForce at http://www.tomshardware.com. A basic description is that it has built-in Geforce2MX (first built-in that is as fast as a card -- but also includes AGP for future), dual channel DDR memory (doubling the speed to 4200MB/s), built-in LAN, built-in Sound that blows away EVERYTHING that Creative Labs has, AMD's HyperTransport connection between the northbridge and southbridge (giving 800MB/s transfer), and a couple other things... nVidia used the same technology that they have developed for the XBox, and are going to bring it to the PCs. If the Intel/Via court actions go in Via's favor, then the nForce may be used with the Pentium4 as well. Motherboards with the nForce should be released soon, I hope.

Then go and get G4 800 MP for the workstations! =)

This is basically what were doing, the system are a liitle different, but on the same level.

 

[ezra]

Originally posted by spike
Firstly you should not upgrade any Macs you have. Buy new ones. Upgrades are usually not worth the money. Especially given the hardware you have.

So, are you saying you can get a system that is twice as fast as the best Apple has to offer, for a $1000?

This seems to be your assumption. And as you say you have done some tests so it is not open to argument from you point. Fair enough.

Im assuming you tested a new G4 against a new PC?

Most other "benchmarks" do not come to this conclusion. They consider the G4 to be faster per MHz than any pentium. So much so that a G4 at the same speed is almost twice as fast in some cases.

Is it no obvious that testing a non functional P4 against a functional G4 is not a fair test? P4 are not fully functional with todays software. If you want to do a fair test you need to test against AMD Athlons. Even Athlons at the same MHz smoke P4 in our test significantly. Not the case with P3's. Tell Steve to try that those tests and see what happens. Think of it this way, a G4 at 867MHz was barely faster than a 800 Athlon, and were talking only few seconds in render time. Here you can see a list of results from our tests, now look at the 500MHz G4 vs 500MHZ AMD. You can see that the Athlon is faster at the same MHz by a fraction. Cinema4D is fully optimized to take full advantage of both processors, so there's no issue with optimization.

http://wsc.mcnet-dabm.de/vimagic.de...sort_max&-SortOrder=Descending&-max=100&-Find

So maybe in your tests hardware wasnt the issue. Software is. And if so then you need to be talking to the developers. You say you receive all the betas etc.. so you must have a line of communication here. It could be the SW is crippled in some way or not optimised for macintosh. I dont know, I dont use this stuff.

Yes, against a crippled P4, not a fully functional AMD. Trust me 3D developers squeez every ounce out of their CPU's, it's not the software, because it holds true across the board on all 3D software. It's very easy to test, you just load the same scene file up on both platforms and compare the render times. PPC chips are not anything special and Mac users need to stop believeing Apples hype. Against a crippled P4 they will seem faster, but against a fully functional AMD they are actually a little bit slower. You can't believe everything your told, you have to test for yourelf, and I encourage anyone to try this, if for nothing elslse the truth. I wish it were true that G4's were faster, because then I might be able to stick with the Macs, but it's just not the case.

Its a very contentious issue.

But, I have been responsible for all sorts of major corporate purchases. And in general there is really very little cost advantage to be had with PC hardware. Im talking buying Dell etc.. hardware here. Not some shoddy knocked up build it yourself box. I mean boxes with hardware warranties and on site 24/7 support etc..
(not that Dell is that great btw

We have good support from all the manufacturer who we use for some of the workstations. If something breaks they replace it, and we've never had a problem. We don't usually need tech support here, most of our animators, and graphic artists can strip down a build back up a pc/mac in a matter of minutes, it's a requirement of ours. You have to have a computer science certificate of some sort so we know that you know your way around the hardware, OS, and applications. The people that work in this industry to be at the level that they are have at least have 10 years of computer experience. That number is starting to drop since studios are training people for specific task, but on a whole it's usually a lot of experience. We only rewuire 5 years, but most have more than that, so it's never a issue.

I should point out this is in the UK, and I dont know what US prices are like.

Apple stuff is a bit more expensive. No argument there. But the difference is really not a consideration in most cases. If a user wants a Mac then they should have one. Maybe I've been spoilt by cash rich companies that know a happy user is a more productive user!

But if you are looking at hardware that is going to be rendering 24/7 and only that, then raw performance is a big issue for you.

So in conclusion, I dont know.
After a few too many glasses of red wine im confused!
I'll say something more usefull in the morning.

spike.

For workstations they can have anything they want, but I have to say not to many asked for Mac this time, and if you take a look at those specs on our benchmark page, you can see why. I don't believe that page has been updated with the new Mac scores, but they are basically the same ratio with as the 500MHz systems. The Athlon at the same MHz was a tiny bit faster. I'm not even sure if the dual PC's were posted, the scores were rediculously high! For instance our G3 333 get a SP score of 4.3 and the dual PC's we bulit got a score of 36.8. The 800 MHz G4 machines scored somewhere around 9.7. A lot if has to do that the CPU has a lot to do with the scree redraws, and the PC's had better OpenGL support, so they could work in reltime on the PC's, while the Mac's had to wait for screen to redraw. We are also testing Dynamics, and Radiosity so the workstations require a lot more speed now then they use to. I'm pretty confident that Apple is aware of these things, after all Steve is still in control of Pixar, and I know that he has to deal with hardware benchmarks for their systems. if Mac's could compare I'm sure you would see RenderMan ported to Os X already. I'm sure we's working on that already though. I think the next few years will be the year will be the big time for the Mac, but today is not a good time for the Mac in my industry. WIth our next revolution of hardware upgrades whic will be in 2004, I'm sure Apple will have a good solution for us.

 

[knighthawk]

Let me say something else about this...

If you upgrade your 333mhz macs without purchasing new machines (by upgrade cards) you are not benefiting Apple in any way. In fact, if you are not going to buy new machines for your render farm, the best thing you could do is to sell the machines or better yet, donate them to a school or university (a nice write-off).

The reason why I say that upgrading your macs would not benefit Apple, is because (I hate to sound like microsoft): it does not give Apple the money, and it does not expand Apple's market share. Donating the computers to a school would definely increase Apples market share because it can influence and benefit hundreds of students. There is a graphic arts trade school in Torrance, CA that is currently using PCs... it would really benefit them to upgrade to macs.

If you were to just sell them as individual machines, it would benefit a lot of people as well. There are a number of graphic arts houses that are still using 7600-9600 as their primary machines. At my work we just purchased the 733 Quicksilver, but the next best machine is the 400mhz G3 B&W. We have 4 other workstations that are pre-G3. With RAM being so expensive for the pre-G3 machines, it is almost better to get a new one.

 

[ezra]

Originally posted by knighthawk
Let me say something else about this...

If you upgrade your 333mhz macs without purchasing new machines (by upgrade cards) you are not benefiting Apple in any way. In fact, if you are not going to buy new machines for your render farm, the best thing you could do is to sell the machines or better yet, donate them to a school or university (a nice write-off).

The reason why I say that upgrading your macs would not benefit Apple, is because (I hate to sound like microsoft): it does not give Apple the money, and it does not expand Apple's market share. Donating the computers to a school would definely increase Apples market share because it can influence and benefit hundreds of students. There is a graphic arts trade school in Torrance, CA that is currently using PCs... it would really benefit them to upgrade to macs.

We have plans for them already, and we were thinking more along the lines of moral support. I does benefit Apple when we say were a Mac only studio and rent out our stations to promote mac use, and when we continue to purchase OS upgrades, and develop software for them. I think your ideas are also very good ones as well, and we wil probably consider that at some time. We donated are 604e's to charity when the time came to upgrade to these machines, and it is a great tax write off as you mentioned.

If you were to just sell them as individual machines, it would benefit a lot of people as well. There are a number of graphic arts houses that are still using 7600-9600 as their primary machines. At my work we just purchased the 733 Quicksilver, but the next best machine is the 400mhz G3 B&W. We have 4 other workstations that are pre-G3. With RAM being so expensive for the pre-G3 machines, it is almost better to get a new one.

I hear ya, and there are a lot of people out their that will never need anything more than this. These machines are still very productives for normal computer use. We still have one of our 604e machines, and it works great as a ftp server running Linux.