SGI or NT which has faster video

[jscott]

I'm considering purchasing a high end workstation and can't decide whether a SGI Octant2 w/2 V12 graphics cards in parallell is faster than a new NT workstatkion with a Wildcat III 6210.

What about an Onyx with 4 raster manages in parallell?

Do these SGI systems have faster graphics than what is available on NT. I see SGI's being used for LOTR, Olympics and other productions but I can't find any performance numbers I can use to justify the cost.

If any of you have experience with SGI vs NT please comment. I work with very large models so this much performance is necessary. Price is no barrier. Looking for opinions on the fastest machine I can run Maya or 3DS Max on.

Thanks,
-jscott

[kiwi]

if price is truly not a factor, then look at Onyx3000 with InfinitePerformance graphics pipes. (up to 128 CPU's)

Performance - (up to) 283 Million Tri's per sec
(up to) 7.7 Gigapixels per sec
(Quadro4/Wildcat3 = (up to) about 60 million tri's per sec)

cost : starts about $650K

-or if you want to save a few hundred thousand dollars, then the Onyx300 with IR3 graphics might be powerful enough for you @ roughly half the performance and one-third the cost of the above unit) (up to 32 CPUs)

cost : about $200K

-to answer your other question:
An SGI Octane 2 w/ V12 graphics (about $26K) will not beat the performance of a Dual P4Xeon(or AThlonMP) with WCIII or Quadro4 - not in interactivity and not in render times.

Is price still not a barrier?

Call me right now!!!
214-755-2244

-Otherwise, you will get a much better price/performance (as a 3D workstation) with Windows-based machine(s)

Heck, for $200K, you can have a HUGE FREEKING render farm, and multiple Maya workstations.

If your scenes bog down, you should probably look at occluding some geometry or hiding other stuff in layers (and kill the lighting).......even ILM and Pixar have to do that routinely.

Big scenes don't necessitate big hardware, and you will ALWAYS reach the performace limit of any hardware if you don't plan ahead..........

kiwi

[jscott]

I talked to an SGI rep. yesterday. He said the InfinitePerformance is really only for vectors and not for displaying shaded views. If you need fast shaded views he said that was what the InfiniteReality 3 was for.

Even IR3 isn't as fast as I would have hoped.

Wildcat III fill rate 400M PPS
IR3 w/4 raster managers in parallel 896M PPS

That's only a little over twice as fast, but for the cost of the machine I could hire another person and we could divide up the work and each still drive new Porsches to work.

Later, thanks for posting. Oh BTW I think the Onyx 3000 can handel 512 processors.

-jscott

[1000101-]

I'd rather the 1000 CPU's of AMD CPU's I could buy with that money myself..
then with whatevers left of my budget I can pay off my parents debt.
then maybe a new car...

[jscott]

I hear you Russell, but I'm concerned with video performance not CPU's. We'll be setting up a render farm w/30 dual processor machines later this year. I think that will be enough to render my projects within a week or two time frame.

I'm trying now to figure out how to work with so much ploygonal data. I think I can load the whole model without crashing my machine. So I should be able to render with the whole model loaded. I'm just unsure of how I'm going to interact with even smaller pieces to generate the animations.

-jscott

[1000101-]

I suppose if real time interaction with a million poly model is an absolute must rather than just having a workflow that uses low poly stuff. (rendering out on the farm any tests at a relatively fast speed) then it might be worth the hundreds of thousands. But unless your in the medial field or maybe geographic research I don't see where this would be needed.
I could be wrong though!

[dougr]

It sounds like it would help if you look at the bigger picture.

If you are setting up a renderfarm w/ 30 dual processor machines....

are those machines windows, linux or irix?
how will your desktop workstation interact with the farm?
Are your frames going to video?
What kind of video system, Avid, Discreet, other?

From my experience, we use Maya on Irix and render on Linux. The 2 work really well together. We also do our video in a Irix Discreet system. We recently added a Win2K machine (SGI branded) to the mix. It is faster when working interactively in Maya than the Octanes and O2s but it was a little tricky getting it to play along on the network with shared storage.

There fewer choices for renderfarm manangement software on Linux and Irix. There are more for Windows. If you are rendering on Irix then the Alias|Wavefront built in distributor should work. On the SGI web page they sell refurbed Origin servers and pretty good prices.

If you do not need the second processor in the desktop machine then I would look at the SGI Fuel workstation same V10 or V12 graphics in Octane2 at a much cheaper price tag. Although the price is still not as cheap as a PC with Wildcat.

I would not get the Octane2 unless you are using it for video at HD or film res.

SGI Irix , SGI hardware and SGI support are all very very reliable and stable. SGI stuff is expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. Yearly service contracts are pricey. And they are not as fast as a homebuilt Pc with a good graphics card. However, when we put our jobs, our reputation and our money on the line, I trust SGI. We still use an original Octane like 7 years old.. still cranking. SGI support has bailed me out several times.

I would think the Fuel or Octane2 would work out. But like I said first look at your overall facility and see what will work best now and in the future.

Hope it helps.