I am a feelancer doing commerical CG's for broadcast. As i have a buget constrain, i am going for MAYA installation on AMD processor on Linux operating system.
When i saw in Alais site i saw only P4's with linux is been tested. I also checked Boxxtech.com where Boxx workstations are loaded with Linux to work on maya. so please let me know some infromation and some benchmarking links.
thanks
Atleast now maya is faster on a p4 (the code is p4 optimized) than on a amd chip! might change in the future or might not.
As far as I know Maya still doesn't take advantage of the P4 Hyperthreading. Mental Ray does but not Maya. Since you are concerned with overhead cost then the AMD procs are a better choice. RedHat is adequate but you may want to look at Novell's SuSE product line. They are continually trying to produce a better product that works with AMD procs. They also offer SuSE in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Their distros seem to compete very well when compared to other boxed distros offered. Novell also offers a free ftp installation of SuSE Personal Desktop which may interest you or you can try the Live Eval CD which is free to download.
Doesent supprt hyperyhreading but rest of maya is p4 optimized. Altough the point of hyperthreading is that it works good even if you arent otimized for it.
No. When I contacted Alias and asked about Maya 5 being able to support Hyperthreaded P4's I was told it's not coded for it yet. So Maya treats the proc like it's one and not two which defeats spending extra for HT. The updated Mental Ray renderer supposedly takes advantage of HT which helps to decrease render time. Maybe when they release Maya 6 we will see Hyperthread support.
Intel is supposed to come out with an XEON-HT 64-bit soon. It will be nice to see comparison Spec.org tests of dual proc configurations against AMD64 and G5's. I don't know if a dual proc XEON 64-bit with Hyperthreading will be like having 4 processors. If it is then it's going to be a great investment when upgrading.
thanks Dark_Knight, as this as i am not getting any technical guys for Suse i think i will go for redhat and by that time i can contact Suse guys in my area
Yes but hyperthreading isnt the only instruction set a p4 has over a amd! Thers still optimization, its just not hyperthread optimized (se maya is compiled with a compiler that does make intel firndly code)! A p4 still is faster on maya. Hyeprthread or not. And a hyperthreaded render is still faster than a non hyperthreaded, in most cases. But only slightly.
And no maya treats it as 2 procs because thats the entire point with hyperthreading technology (it was created thisway so that all would benefit readily optimize or not). To fool ANY program to think theres 2 procs! Just that if a program knew it in fact still is 1 proc it could use it in a more beneficial manner. This is called hyperthread optimizing. Maya offcourse is threaded so it works fine. Only not as fine as it could.
This is easily prooved by most bechmarks.
There are several SuSE users here or you can try forums such as www.linuxforum.com. Linux Forum has several links to tutorials and covers all the popular distros.
If you purchase a boxed version of SuSE from Novell you get 3 months free techinical support which may help you resolve issues quickly during production. SuSE also allows access to YOU (Yast Online Update) for free. No annual licensing or hidden fees to worry about.
Also, I requested Alias to consider testing Maya with other distros and posting installation help on their site. Since RedHat has gone so Microsoft in their behavior I'm sure a lot of companies are reconsidering whether or not to use RedHat. Look at what is happening with RedHat 9. They are axing support in April which leaves you to use one of their more expensive packages or go with Fedora that has no support.
Joojaa,
Please contact Alias so they can explain to you why Maya cannot take advantage of the HT instructions on a P4 since Maya is not coded for this. If what ever app you are using is not coded to use HT then HT is by default switched off. Thus Maya doesn't treat a P4 like 2 procs as you stated since HT is not part of the coding in Maya 5.
See the included link for the specbench Maya tests. You'll notice that on older tests the P4-HT performed well but with newer tests it starts to fall behind other systems. It's like using a dual proc system such as dual Opteron or G5's. Maya cannot use both CPU's during modeling, animating, etc but does use the second proc for rendering. The dissadvantage for anyone using Maya's default renderer is that it won't recognize Hyperthreading since it's not coded for this. Newer versions of Mental Ray do. This was one of the major complaints from the Maya community that rushed out to purchase new P4-HT systems then to find out that HT is not supported in Maya 5. Alias will most likely resolve this with their next release.
As for AMD procs you should read some of the performance tests they have with Maya and XSI. Advances like their Quantaspeed architecture are some things that Maya can take advantage of. Also cost is another factor since at present AMD procs beat Intel prices. It doesn't mean they are of lesser quality it's just that AMD is always one step ahead of the competition. Something to consider when making future upgrades.
PROC COMPARISON:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_865_9014,00.html
AMD PROCESSORS:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118,00.html
Anyone with newer procs whether AMD, Intel or Apple should send their test results to Spec for posting on their Maya performance benchmarks.
MAYA TEST RESULTS:
http://www.specbench.org/gpc/apc.data/apc\_...50\_summary.html
MAYA TEST RENDER:
http://www.specbench.org/gpc/apc.static/maya5info.html
Ok im talking of rendering and you of uis. Yes i know that the ui isnt threaded.
But maya renders faster whrn ht is on as opposed to whan its switched off (wich means maya benefits form this).... Offcourse the UI isnt threaded so there it doesnt help. But that wasnt anything new (the ui isnt prbably going to be threaded either so from that point of wiev maya does not use ht yes). THis also mean that while maya can use 2 procs you wont se a difference if you just use the ui!
Wich comes to ainteresting fact that using maya un hyperthreaded in ui mode could be faster but it isnt since maya is not the only thing you push and drag around in the ui stage.
But mayvbe our report differences come from the fact that we talk of two different things! And yes any threaded program automaticaly uses HT.
Most of the reason maya isn't coded for this is because its not really even all that SMP aware either. A couple elements are but thats about it. HT's very principle is really designed to fool the OS into believing that one CPU is really 2. I wouldn't expect maya 6 to be any more HT aware than 5 was.
Depending on the scene; rendering with the maya software renderer will sometimes be faster; sometimes be slower. Varies from scene to scene. This likely won't change much with most software. HT is more or less one of those "Hey this is a cool thing to have" things that intel puts in chips to sell them. It seems to work fairly well on some of our servers that serve java based apps though and a couple software packages we run that are mostly TCL script based.
All in all I think SSE2 and SSE3 are much more important developments than hyperthreading.
General workstation/home use though seems like more of a fad. I'd rather a 2nd physical CPU.
As far as intel's 64 bit xeon; I think that unless intel ditches its current memory to CPU bus then they are still going to keep falling behind.
Yes from usage perspective a SSE2 and sse3 does give more omph than hyperthreading does (even for progs like renderman). THis is pretty ovious if you compare a fast pIII with a slow P4. Instead of the p4 being slightly faster it ends up being considerably faster. (and the fact that maya is optimized for a p4, wich is totaly separated form ht support fact).
I thought only dynamics was SSE2 optimized (for P4.)
My 1.5ghz athlon on a crappy mobo with slow ram is ~10% faster in the Maya 5 SPEC cpu test than the baseline system (1.5ghz P4 on nice hardware.)
The CPU test pushes a subd surface through a lattice if I remember right. It's painfully slow.
Of course, any advantage the Athlon has is eclipsed by the much higher clockspeed of the current P4s. So, the discussion is basically academic/measurebating. The real question is:
When will Maya and Mental Ray be compiled for 64bit cpus/addressing?
yeah, in about 2 years maybe 
a 64 bit maya won't run without a 64bit OS. windwos-XP64 ES won't be in final release for another year, it is in preview release now over the next year.
it unlikely they'll make a mac 64bit version because of the tiny market share, maybe a quick recompile of the renderer but that's just a guess. IRIX has the same problem, its been 64 bit for years but maya has remained 32bit because its arguable if going to a 64 bit mayay GUI would yield much of a performance gain, that and IRIX's market share has plummted in 3D.
Linux... i'm not sure that maya is qualified to run on any existing 64bit version of Linux....?
Re: "Linux... i'm not sure that maya is qualified to run on any exisiting 64bit version of Linux....?"
Since Alias hasn't coded Maya as 64-bit I doubt they have tested it on a 64-bit version of Linux. If they have they won't admit it since that would raise questions why Maya is still not 64-bit. Though you can still take advantage of a lot of features provided by 64-bit even when Maya is not 64-bit.
Also, a few distros such as SuSE come with support for the AMD64 proc line. Unlike Intel's Itanium the AMD64 is backwards compatible to allow 32-bit and 64-bit apps running on SuSE 64-bit that is also backwards compatible. Another improvement in Linux is for example SuSE's ability to handle instruction sets for multiple procs and Intel's Hyperthreading.
Yeah, I know I mention SuSE a lot but it's the only distro I have found that didn't cause dependecy and conflict issues (besides RedHat) when installing/running Maya 5.0 (SuSE Pro 9.0). Also YAST in SuSE makes life so much easier when transitioning from Windows or OSX to Linux.
I'll test it this weekend. I fully expect it to run just fine since most (read: all) of the libs maya pulls from will be 32 bit as well. I currently expect slightly less performance because of slightly more latency because of somewhat larger chunks of data being passed about by the kernel.
Also; Itanium can run x86 code; the problem is performance. Well that and your buying a 4 thousand dollar CPU that is about 1/5th the speed of a 200 dollar CPU.