Just wanted to whet everyone's whistle a bit with my little story.
Im a 3D animation student with a large large large animation/movie project moving into its final stages for the semester. I have a 400mHz G4 Tower (1gig ram) and a 550 mHz Titanium (512 ram). I do most of my animating and stuff on the laptop, and use the tower for rendering for ram reasons.....until.......
I decided to lug all of my render files and textures to school where we have some dual 800's (1gig, why not 1.5 Im not sure) sitting around not doing anything. Well, I fired up OSX, threw my files onto the server and 6 hours later, had my first camera move rendered. That may not seem like much to you, until I tell you that the same render at home took anywhere between 24-30 hours. Yes my friends, the Dual 800 IS 4x faster (or more).
There were two renderlines running from the dual processors, running twice as fast each than my 400. Yeah. Twice as fast, times 2.
If that dont make you want to spend another 3 grand, I dont know what would. Now that the dual 1gig are out, it (theoretically) should be 5 times faster. Once I get all of my actual animation done, rendering will (now) be a snap. For a five minute movie, what would have been a 40 DAY render, will now take about a week and a half.
Im a 3D animation student with a large large large animation/movie project moving into its final stages for the semester. I have a 400mHz G4 Tower (1gig ram) and a 550 mHz Titanium (512 ram). I do most of my animating and stuff on the laptop, and use the tower for rendering for ram reasons.....until.......
I decided to lug all of my render files and textures to school where we have some dual 800's (1gig, why not 1.5 Im not sure) sitting around not doing anything. Well, I fired up OSX, threw my files onto the server and 6 hours later, had my first camera move rendered. That may not seem like much to you, until I tell you that the same render at home took anywhere between 24-30 hours. Yes my friends, the Dual 800 IS 4x faster (or more).
There were two renderlines running from the dual processors, running twice as fast each than my 400. Yeah. Twice as fast, times 2.
If that dont make you want to spend another 3 grand, I dont know what would. Now that the dual 1gig are out, it (theoretically) should be 5 times faster. Once I get all of my actual animation done, rendering will (now) be a snap. For a five minute movie, what would have been a 40 DAY render, will now take about a week and a half.
