I got a dvd player this week, and wanted to make sure it could play dvd's my mac burns, so i decided to render out some simple camera moves through my snowy scene so i could burn my first dvd.

it's taking my dual 1.25 mac an hour and fifteen minutes per frame (at 1440x960 which will get scaled down to 720x480 for final output).

it's taking my girlfriend's G4-400 3.5 hours per frame, and it's only taking my G3 266 45 minutes per frame. Hmmmm.

the G3 is running in OS9, which requires less overhead than X, but i believe the real time saver is that the camera move i'm having it render doesn't ever see the icicles. i've noticed that the transparency and refraction settings on them kill my render speeds.

i'm bummed out that the frames are taking this long on the slower machines, it makes GI very impractical. thank goodness i can render in the background on my MP machine. i would go out of my mind if i had to leave it alone for the next 4 days.

Sounds like dual 1.25's would be bad choices for a render farm if a movie has 24 or 29.97 fps and lasts longer than a second.

I did some performance tests a while back and my single processor Athlon2100+ PC blew away a dual 1Ghz Mac. There are lots of reasons to love Macs but performance isn't one of them!

i believe the point i was making was that the content being rendered (in this case high poly objects with transparency, glow, and refraction) can bring powerful machines to their knees. Remember the G3 didn't have to render any transparncy or refraction. hartcons, yes, macs seem to suck at 3D. i haven't tested this with other software, but they certainly get schooled in carrara. however, macs crush pc's in 2D so it all comes down to which tool you need for the job. when i get ready to mass render, i plan on getting an athlon or two. but for working on the scenes it's much nicer to be on my platform of choice.

One day and a halve and I am on 27,6% on my B&W G3. Rendering an image that is 2000x2000, has 85plus Mb of texture Map Surface and is being rendered with GI and 'light through transparancy)! Well, I DID put texture maps in almost every channel of every shader. So I am the first to blame. Firstly I started with the "use interpolation" option turned off. 5% took 24 hours then! But I thougt that C2 and OSX was the bad combination that drives me slightly mad. But now I read that Mac is not a very good choice in 3D at all... I hope my new image will finish rendering before 2003. But I am actually not very sure about that...