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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)?
I've been using 7 AlphaStation 255s as a renderfarm for the last few years - works rather nicely, just using standard linux job distribution/allocation, and rendering all sods and sorts. Also, they're dirt cheap!
I personally wouldn't go the Renderdrive route. I don't have first-hand experience with it, but I have heard from other artists that have said that it imposes some rules about what you can do with it. Its core functionality is supposed to be pretty darned good, but if you try to step out of bounds of the renderer, you're in trouble.
You should examine, though, what your needs are and think about whether or not the limitations of the RD would really be a BFD to you or not.
So.. unless the RD is really what you're after, that leaves AMD and Intel. Frankly, this is a tough call. The deciding factor may very well be the renderer you use. AMD's done a real nice job of keeping the render speed per dollar ratio nice and affordable. Intel, however, has a few tricks under the hood that some 3D apps make really good use of. Hyperthreading really muddies the waters as well. For the longer more detailed scenes, I've seen a good deal of benefit from using Hyperthreading on a P4 via Lightwave. Although, for smaller scenes, the overhead of setting up multiple threads can often defeat the purpose of using HT.
Yeah, I know, not a very helpful answer. I think if you went AMD, you'd see a price savings, and not lose a whole heck of a lot of performance. At least that's the direction I'd go. However, I wouldn't buy either until I've taken a typical scene from my 3D app and performed a benchmark analysis on either of the two processors. I mean do this first hand, don't read the benchmark sites, they can be very misleading.
Fun stuff. Truth be told, though, I think you'll go with either one and find times where you ache for the other. Grass is always greener?
"Derp de derp."
I somehow doubt that this company actually designed and fabbed a 'real' chip....I somewhat suspect that the rendering chip might actually be an FPGA. Anyone know for sure?
-psy
Just got back from a couple days in Vegas. NAB had tons of rendering demos and benchmarks. One of the more interesting things (I thought) was Nvidia letting you leverage their GPU's in the Quadro line of cards for rendering. (demo I saw was using Linux with python and C++ connections doing maya stuff, though they said Win32 was supported as well).
Otherwise, lots of people with software that farmed out rendering to clusters of commodity blade servers. The dual CPU 1U x86-64 was a screamer, though not as compact as some of the other arrangements I saw.
Better shop around a bit more...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
In my ten years in the computer graphics business, I can't tell you how many specialized hardware rendering platforms I've seen come, and go. Renderdrive has hung on longer than others, but I still feel that nothing beats the bang/buck of a stable of nice commodity hardware.
A lot depends on what application you plan on running. Each app has their own approach to distributed processing, and their support (or lack thereof) for any given hardware is critical.
I would lean towards AMD 64-bit CPUs at this time. Some renderers are optimized for P4, but the AMD chips seem to run P4 code quite well, and they run all other X86 code wonderfully.
You can rack up a bunch of commodity boxes for a great price, and render to your heart's content on them. In some cases, depending on support from your rendering software vendor, you might even be able to run Linux on them.
I will put in a plug here for an open-source program I created, SuperConductor (http://super-conductor.org/ that is a multi-application portable render farm controller. It's written in Qt 3, and runs on Linux and Windows right now (no Mac Qt dev kit to try it on). It currently supports my rendering software (World Construction Set/Visual Nature Studio) but is designed to be extensible to other renderers. We could use someone to add support for Maya, POV-Ray, or other apps. The freshest source (a complete rewrite) is in SourceForge CVS right now!
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Where do the G5s line up in the comparison?