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Best Platform for Running Maya?
Kieckerjan asks: "A friend of mine, who's an architect, has been appointed a research position at a small university. Along with the job he's been assigned
a budget to spend on whatever he thinks is necessary to get the job done. One of the things he needs is a fast machine to run Maya.
As he is fed up with Wintel systems, he's been looking into alternatives. His eye fell on SGI's Fuel workstation, which costs about 15.000 EURO. For that kind of money you can buy a seriously bad-assed pentium-based system, and run Linux on it. His question to me was: is it worthwhile to shell out the extra money for a SGI system? Since I have no experience with modern SGI's, I am in no position to judge about performance differences, but maybe
someone on this forum does."
Maya in Mac OS X is a nice solution. Get the fastest available Powermac G4 and max out the RAM. Result: You have a very nice setup for using Maya.
Your experience is not typical. In the absence of a serious hardware fault, IRIX never crashes. And the only way you can "screw something over so bad that you'd need to reinstall the OS" is by doing something incredibly dumb. My personal favorite happened once when I was trying to change the ownership of an entire directory of files. I typed "sudo chown foo.foo ." The only thing is, the period and the slash keys are, like, right next to each other. So I ended up typing "sudo chown foo.foo /". By the time I slammed control-C, it had already made it through /bin and was working on /dev. I could have fixed it, but it was just easier to boot miniroot and reinstall the base OS pieces to reset the permissions and ownerships.
Contrary to your opinion, IRIX is one of the most stable and friendly OSs out there. Oh, and it's not "UNIX-based." It's UNIX. SGI has licensed the UNIX trademark from The Open Group for IRIX, so it's a full-fledged UNIX operating system.
I write in my journal
but...
There is that cost premium with them. And support. Neither of which are cheap. And at this stage in the game, I don't know how worthwhile it is.
Our studio switched from an SGI only house to some blend of Linux/IRIX. We are moving towards Linux only on the desktop, but it is possible for us to get some OS X boxes for compositing.
Depending on the level of work your friend is doing and how much raw power he needs, the choice can change. I assume that he would mostly be doing single frame renders. And if they are at high quality, he will need some serious horse power. Will he be using the Maya renderer or another one?
Our switch to Linux was decent since we came from a unix back ground. The users were used to the IRIX desktop and it did not take long for them to feel comfortable using gnome.
The OS X solution is extremely valid. I would have laughed at it a year ago, but having used Maya a bit on it and seeing just how well respected OS X is in the industry, I don't feel it is a bad way to go.
When there is only a few artists and not a big support staff, you have to go with a name brand system. It is unfortunate that a premium like that must be payed, but downtime is a big killer. When it can take a day or so to render and your system is down 2 days before something is needed, the preasure to get it going again is imense.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I work for a used SGI reseller. You need to go SGI if you need I/O bandwidth. The bus on Intel-based machines doesn't cut it, no matter how fast the mhz. Pay for I/O performance, not fast, but mostly useless CPU speed.
-BrentBarely. I'm not going to get into a Linux flame war. Just know that my opinion of Linux as a single-user, general-purpose desktop operating system is not high.
One of the main reasons that the CGI house are going to Linux on the workstation is that they are cheap, compared to SGI machines.
You're sort-of right, but for the wrong reasons. The first Linux box you deploy costs considerably more, in time and energy, than a single SGI workstation. According to folks at ILM, they had to actually go in and do a lot of driver-level work to get the Linux NFS implementation to work reliably for them. So their first Linux box cost them tens of thousands of dollars to deploy.
But their 100th Linux box-- by which time they'd gotten all the bugs worked out-- cost them practically nothing above the cost of the hardware, which is very inexpensive compared to SGI hardware. So Linux as a professional animation or compositing workstation platform makes sense, but only in context of an economy of scale.
This submitter was asking about a single workstation for a single user. I don't think Linux would be a good choice there. It's harder to configure and use than IRIX, and it's less fully featured than OS X. In this specific case, I think Linux would probably be the worst of both worlds.
That's true, but again in a way that nullifies the point. PC hardware improves more quickly than SGI hardware, but the SGI hardware was a hell of a lot better than the PC hardware to start with, so it's a question of catching up. There's no PC in the world that can match the capabilities of an Octane2 or a Fuel*. Someday the PCs will catch up, but not for a while yet.
The implication of this fact is actually a pretty good thing for the owner of the SGI gear. Like Macs, SGI workstations keep their value much longer than PCs do. Last year's top-of-the-line PC is worth a couple hundred bucks now, at best. Last year's Mac or SGI can be sold for 80% of its list price. So if you buy a Mac or an SGI, your investment may possible be greater (in the case of an SGI, definitely so) but it'll be protected longer.
* Of course, if you don't need those particular capabilities, the Octane2 or the Fuel would be a big waste of money for you.
I write in my journal
I recommend going for a second user SGI system.
An earlier poster stated that his SGI Octane workstation kept up with his dual processor P4. That's quite impressive for an out of date machine.
The thing about SGI machines is their bus bandwidth. It's all very well having several gigahertz at your disposal along with a top of the range graphcis card, but a PC just does not have the ability to connect them at a fast enough rate. An SGI octane uses the same design as the supercomputers - a crossbar switch. The XIO bus in an Octane can have multiple 1.6GB/s streams. Add in the power of multiple MIPS processors and MXE graphics and you have a powerful setup.
Octanes are available second hand from lots of places, such as SGI themselves, Ebay and others.
Steve.
A latent existence
And of course, I don't how much more high end you can get than CGI work for a major animated film...
Considerably.
The thing about the big effects houses is that they typically try to spend as little on the workstations as possible, while investing big in the render farm or farms. For example, compositors at ILM use CompTime on things like O2s and cheap Linux machines. You can't do anything in real time at full resolution on those machines; you use proxies for everything, then submit the job to the render farm for full-resolution processing and go on to work on your next shot. The next day, you look at the results of your render in dailies and make changes based on it, repeating the whole process.
That works well in what is basically a factory setting. But it's not right for everyone. If you're working by yourself, like the subject of this discussion will be, it makes more sense to have a computer that's as interactive as possible so you can get instant feedback. Instant feedback at ILM wouldn't help anybody, because you have to take your work to the VFX supe anyway for review. Making the desktop machines more interactive in that setting would just be a waste of money.
I write in my journal