On Wednesday 12 April 2006 05:17, Anne Wilson wrote: >My grandson is about to embark on a university course for computer > graphics and animation, and as such, he keeps an eye out for graphics > card developments. He has spotted that cclonline are offering a > 512MB graphics card for under £100, but on investigation it turns out > to be PCI Express, which his motherboard doesn't support. Upgrading > card, mobo and cpu (and possibly RAM) is beyond his budget. > >The question, then, is whether such an upgrade would provide a truly > useful improvement, with regard to his uni work. I am happy to > finance the move if it does, but not if it only improves > game-playing. > >I'd appreciate any comments. Reply off-list, if it seems appropriate. > Thanks > >Anne Generally, render time is cash time to a graphics production facility. We have such a pci-x system running at the tv station, not sure of the actual card involved, but the whole system runs on an Apple G5, with 3 monitors, and does from scratch animation renders at about 1/2 real time, cacheing the results to hard drives. The previous system we had to do that ran on x86 stuff and the render time was at least 10 minutes for a 30 second spot. I believe this one also can directly output the mpeg2 video, but its quicker to pipe it to a realtime vela encoder card in another machine. I can remember when such a project, done on an amiga, was a weeks work or more, done in its spare time on a 24/7 basis. So it might have 12 to 18 hours a day to devote to the graphics rendering. However, to consider that systems use for a student isn't at all practical since that systems costs ran well into the 5th digit in dollars. One should add that just because a system is fast, doesn't make it automaticly high quality, that can only come from the hands doing the compositing. Slow systems therefore encourage the student to do it right the first time and might well be the better teacher at the end of the course. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
