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."

Comments

Dreamworks...

[OneFix]

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.

Re:Dreamworks...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:I wouldn't think so

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Depends

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The right answer here depends on a lot of stuff that you (the submitter, that's right, I'm talking to you) didn't tell us.

What's your friend's level of comfort with UNIX? IRIX is a very well documented OS, but there are few places you can go for help if you get stuck. You have to be prepared to sit down and read the manuals (techpubs.sgi.com).

Does your friend want to do anything else with the computer? Like, say, surf the web or read email? If so, he'll be happier with either a Windows XP machine (and you said he's "fed up") or a Mac. Doing basic stuff on an IRIX box-- like word processing or email-- is like chewing on tin foil. Most people I know keep a PC or a Mac next to their SGI system for doing everything other than what they use their SGI system for.

Is a new machine the right answer for this guy? You can get used Octanes pretty reasonably. Fuel comes with V12 graphics (I think V10 is also an option, but I'm not positive), and that's pretty serious stuff, but you can probably get your hands on an MXE or similar system for considerably less than a new Fuel. Consider contacting SGI's remanufacturing division; they sell older systems at a substantially reduced cost. Although I don't know if they sell to overseas customers. Might be US-only.

All in all, I think the best choice is probably going to be a top-o-the-line Power Mac G4 with the fastest graphics card available. Right now, I think that's the GeForce 4 Titanium, for about $400. It's no V12, but it'll do the job. The dual processors are a nice bonus, letting you work at full speed while doing test renders in the background (I use that feature all the time on my dual 1 GHz "Speed Holes" model.) And because OS X is UNIX in all but name, you get all the advantages of running UNIX on your desktop while still being able to run stuff like Microsoft Office should you need it.

I guess what I'm saying is that you should think about the questions I asked, carefully weigh all the factors, and then buy a Mac. ;-)

Ask the manufacturer

[Katravax]

Has it occurred to you to ask the manufacturer (Alias|Wavefront) rather than asking a bunch of high school and college kids on Slashdot? You're going to spend tons of money on the software, but then ask a bunch of beginners and web typists for advice on the hardware? Please.

I/O is most important

[bmetzler]

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