On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Michael Miles <mmamiga6@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > Well, 3D animation is my thing and has been since the Amiga platform. > The power to render many minutes of animation and still have functional > machine to do the rest of my daily activity. > > I use a virtual machine running windows 7 for my animation software and > if I want to convert a HD movie at the same time as I do everything else > it shows a definite slow down. I run a 4-node rendering cluster ( dual quad-cores on each, or 32 cores total and 16G RAM each node). They're headless and just have minimal local disks. All nodes write via bonded 2 x 1Gb Ethernet to a fileserver, but network is usually not the bottleneck. When in use, CPUs are pegged for hours at a time. Modeling is done on a quad-core Windows 7 system with some relatively high-end ATI cards, but gets final render in the cluster. HD conversion is a minor step since the renders are done at final resolution. My point is that it may be more effective to separate your rendering hardware. I.e., you can buy a low-end desktop with decent video cards that will run your software natively *and* a separate, headless compute node that does all the heavy lifting rather than try to bulk up a desktop. The desktop will generally have crappy disk i/o, crappy memory limits (8G is average), crappy network (wireless or GBit), and your CPU will be busy drawing a pretty desktop than actually rendering frames. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
