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Best Platform for Running Maya?

Posted by Cliff on from the king-of-the-mayan-hill dept.

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."

3 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I wouldn't think so by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. I/O is most important by bmetzler · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    -Brent
  3. Re:Dreamworks... by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Informative

    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