Rendering Processors: AR350 vs AMD vs P4?

landrau asks: "I'm planning on building a render farm and was wondering whether anyone would know the pros and cons of the AR350 processor, used in The Renderdrive, as opposed to building a renderfarm with an AMD or P4 processor." While the Renderdrive looks like a real rendering workhorse that can produce some gorgeous results (see images in page header), does it justify its lofty pricetag of £6950 (over $12,300USD)?

Comments

Vanilla hardware

[tolldog]

I have used P3 and P4 based systems (and SGI's before that) and have been happy with the speed to dollar ratio.

I have never tested or looked at the render drive, the price seemed a tad high.

I would rather be able to do several frames at a time than one frame really fast.

I imagine the AMD64 based solutions will be nice farm boxes as well. Rendering is so IO intensive, having a wider, faster memory bus has to help.

-Tim

Re:Vanilla hardware

[tolldog]

I am talking purely about the memory bus and the speed gains from that, not the 32bit vs 64bit nature.

The AMD64 systems have faster memory access than the Pentium based systems. Its comperable to the bus on Apple's G5 (AMD and Apple worked together on it).

-Tim

Yes they did..

[elrond1999]

"The AR350 uses a 0.22-micron line size and is delivered in an SFBGA package" 0.22 is pretty decent. And its a programmable processor, so its more like an ASIP than an ASIC.

The Ray Tracing Graphics Processor The AR350 is the company's second-generation ray tracing processor. The AR350 features a memory manager to access local DRAM, an on-chip data cache to reduce the bandwidth required of the host bus and two 3D rendering cores. Each rendering core performs both the geometry and the shading operations of the ray tracing algorithm. The geometry co-processor of each core is capable of performing a ray / triangle intersection calculation every processor cycle. The shading co-processor is completely end-user programmable through the RenderMan Shading Language. A simple interface between AR350s produces a scaleable architecture with good processor linearity. The AR350 uses a 0.22-micron line size and is delivered in an SFBGA package for integration into the heart of ART VPS rendering devices. The AR350 delivers four times the rendering speed of the AR250. The first ray tracing chip - the AR250 - represented a new class of graphics processor - the photorealistic rendering chip. Unlike other graphics chips that use simple 'painter' algorithms to generate images, ART's processors use the physically-based ray tracing algorithm to generate images of stunning quality. The AR250 was the first processor to use ART's dedicated ray tracing architecture, giving unrivaled rendering performance.

Gelato

[dFaust]

Another possible consideration would be nVidia's newly announced Gelato. $2750 per license, plus the cost of a good Quadro card to make it worthwhile. It's yet to be seen what kind of performance and quality this will offer, but certainly something to keep an eye on.

On another note, I haven't been keeping up with my 3D like I used to, but some software, such as Renderman, can do distributed rendering on a single frame, and then automagically merge the results. I don't think Brazil offers this yet (could be wrong?), but they're working on it (under the name of Banshee, bottom of page. If your renderer of choice offers such a feature, you could build some serious distributed rendering for $12k.