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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."

5 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Dreamworks... by OneFix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Uses Maya on Intel boxes...they are currently one of the many graphics houses in Hollywood that are switching over to Linux...

    They are using high-end nVidia cards ...and all told, the advantages of using Linux just far outweighs the advantages of using SGI hardware.

    1. Re:Dreamworks... by 4of12 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      using high-end nVidia cards ...and all told, the advantages of using Linux just far outweighs the advantages of using SGI hardware.

      That's my experience, too.

      The price/performance ratio of Lintel is hard to beat.

      I think it depends on your price point and tolerance and desire for reliability.

      For seriously high-end stuff, go with the SGI. But if you're budget's not unlimited and you're willing to suffer some hiccups once in a while, you owe it to yourself to see what the "low end" can offer these days. It's not too shabby and beats out a lot of the older SGI hardware.

      --
      "Provided by the management for your protection."
    2. Re:Dreamworks... by CaptMonkeyDLuffy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hmmm... Last I'd heard, most major render farms used linux for the final renders(because of the price/performance issue), but tended to avoid it on the workstation front beause of various shortcomings... Mostly some comercial flavor of Unix(or a rare Mac) on the desktop to do the design, but a fleet of x86 Linux boxes for the final render...

    3. Re:Dreamworks... by OneFix · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Oh, but you are assuming that this guy is only able to afford 1 Linux box...

      For the price of 1 SGI box you could probably have at least 5 or 6 dual 2Ghz processor Intel/AMD boxes on a cluster...And I can guarantee you that small render farm is gonna beat out the SGI...

      As far as graphics performance...I'm sure the Quadro 900 XGL would be enough power (if it's not beating the V12 in performance) for whatever is needed...the price is a little steep though (~$1000 for a PNY card)...

      As far as raw CPU power goes...a dual 2GHz Lintel box just HAS to be beating a 600MHz MIPS...no matter how much better the MIPS processors are...

      As far as that goes...I think all you have to read is this article...where Vice President of R&D for Pixar said...."This is the platform that will replace SGI in the CG industry. There's been a lot of progress made since last year. Nobody is wondering 'if' anymore."

  2. Why Not Wintel? by murat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I suppose a dual P4, 1GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 9700 based graphics card and Windows 2000 Professional will do very well and it will be cheap enough.