Workstations For Poor 3D-artists

Peter writes: "Ace's hardware has written an 'article for the creative people, who are searching to build or buy an affordable number cruncher to run their favorite workstation application. Maybe you already have an Athlon Thunderbird/XP and you are wondering if a dual Thunderbird/Athlon XP workstation might make sense for you. Or you might be interested in an affordable dual Athlon MP 1800+ workstation.' Included are benchmarks based on almost all available 3D-animation packages."

Comments

Re:3D Artists?

[eric2hill]

Martin Hash has a product called Animation Master. It's spline based and cheap. Find it here. It's got a little bit of a learning curve, but it's quite full featured and comes with a nice book. "We make software even an artist can afford." It's $299 for a new copy, and $99 for an upgrade. They release a new version about every year or two. They have versions for both Windows and Mac.

This was a shockingly poor article

[Anonymous Coward]

It was nothing to do with affordable, cheap 3D workstations. It was about the latest and greatest x86 CPUs - and the latest and greatest, high-end software.

There are better machines out there - SGI Indigo2s and Octanes with OpenGL (and more!) in the hardware, many decent Macs - all of which are more affordable 2nd hand than the wunderboxen on display here.

And if you're looking for a career in 3D animation/design, are you going to use some x86 toy, or would experience with what the rest of the industry uses be a bit more helpful in your career?

A vanishingly small amount of 3D work requires a fast CPU - it's about shoving large amounts of data around. It doesn't matter how many mhz your bus does - it's still a data bus, and it's inherently unsuited to this type of work.

Look at the Octane's Crossbar. Look at the O2s UMA architecture.

Apple continue to make the same mistake, and are going to cripple their G5 machines. Lovely fast processor, crap bus to the gfx, memory and disk.

And I just loved the way this compares the Shake results to a 4 year old Octane. Nice. I notice we don't see any playback information at high resolution - what's the point of fast render speeds if you can't *view* what you've just created?

Never mind that 4 year old Octane can be bought for a fraction of the price of the systems under discussion.

This was a truly laughable article that, while demostrating an understanding of consumer x86 toys, showed a clear lack of clue about 3D graphics needs.

That this article ever showed up on /. is a pretty sad statement about what has become of this once useful and interesting site.

I'm surprised we haven't see the Linux kiddies moaning about how the tests were run on Windows 2k.