Just cureous I allways hear of 3Ds Max being optimized and taking advantage of dual cpus, and I'm ready to upgrade my computer when the new dual athlon boards hit the streets, anyway is Maya gonna take advantage with the 2nd cpu is it optimized for 2 cpus? I know rendering will for sure but basic operations of maya like modeling and animationing in hardware let me know pls...
having said that I'm thinking either of the three
Single CPU 1.4 AMD Tbird 2 gigs of 133 Ram
or
Single CPU 1.4 AMD TBird 1 gig of 266 DDR Ram
or
Dual CPU two 1.4 AMD Tbirds 1 gig of 266 DDR Ram..
as far as i know max and most apps in general can only make use of a single processor. where you actually use that second proc is in rendering. and yes maya's renderer is fully multi threaded. id go with the single proc amd with the ddr ram, you can always buy another cpu if you find yourself rendering alot.
Maya will use the second CPU only in rensering tasks. Your video card will also take benefit of dual cpu(through OpenGl) so interactive manipulations will be faster with two cpu than one. Paint fx in Maya 4 is multithreaded. All others calculations don't care about the second proc. Dual cpu is very usefull, for exemple you'll be able to run Maya+a 2d app at the same time or use a cpu for rendering and the other for working in MAYA.
In Gold They Trust. Edited by skelter on 07/01/01 04:52:48 PM.
acually yes. If you afford a dual system it is worth the money . I think he ment rendering tasks.,. and well for the extra cash that is well worth it alone.
Thought i might as well mention that if you get a graphic card that has drivers that can re-off-load some of the display rendering pipeline back to the CPU's, and they are multi-threaded (which pretty much just means 3dlabs cards), then you will be able to throw heavier models around faster with a second CPU. Well thats the theory, im not sure about the praxis.
But as for software specific procedures/tasks - see above. I guess they just found that these operations benefit little (or hurt) from threading, perhaps they are heavily depedent on the last instruction's results and 2cpu's would be tied up sharing what they just found out all the time ... which may have implications for an OS like w2k which is trying to thread stuff up itself even if the app doesnt? 2cpu's may actually be a little slower than a single for such operations? Tho it seems some ops will favour a partuclar CPU . Not sure.
I only have a single workstation, so its all about multitasking and rendering, thats why i have 2. Less time waiting, more time creating. Depends what you think about while you wait really.
Check the test center to see speeds of rendering for various CPU and memory configurations.
DDR is only marginally faster than SDR right now, but that will change. The advantage of buying DDR now is that the chips will last you through future systems. Unless you are doing hopelessly complex scenes, 1GB of RAM should do you well for the next while, but if you are going SDR, please tell me where you can find 512MB CL2 chips, otherwise I'd go for 768MB of Micron CL-2 (have you found a mobo that supports 4 memory slots??) The DDR is most useful in dual configurations..
All said, you are going to be waiting a bit for an MP motherboard and Palomino cores at 1.4GHz, but if I had to pick from the three, I'd definitely go for duals. If you want to run a single chip on renders, you can continue to work on your scenes while you render in the background.. or , buy TWO single 1.4 boxes, one with just basic hardware (ie: crummy video card) and offload your renders to that.
The gain of pefs with a dual system is about 50%. As U might know the dual AMP 760 mobo is very expensive but compared to an Intel solution u will save money and gain power.
There is a new MB from Asus coming out this month and will take the mp CPUs from AMD, I just heard that it will only take the MP Cpus...is that true?!!? what do you mean about the Palomino chips are they gonna be out soon are they gonna be compatible with that new board from Asus? All the new mbs support 4 slots which is good I'll probably just go with DDR, sd ram is so cheap now I can get 512 for $105 canadian I'm not sure if it's CL2 though...
I don't really care about rendering it takes a while anyway all I care about is the speed up of running maya and say working with polyconnect scripts and having a highres model and working with a low res model and having it go fast same with running animation...I want to upgrade soon I just have to figure out if I should wait a bit more for that board to come out...I don't know the exact date yet but they said this month...but then again I don't know if AMD realised the MP chips yet I haven't seen them around arggg so many questions...
Its out, not in MP mode yet which should be in August. A single 1.2 MP is faster than a single 1.4. Prefetching and other featuress make it faster. Dan