Standard Sponza scene, 1024 x 768, render to screen, ultra rendering mode. Athlon XP1800+ (1533 Mhz) : 2h 11mn 40s Athlon XP2400+ (2000 Mhz) : 1h 41mn 07s Dual Athlon MP1800+ (2x1533 Mhz) : 1h 15mn 00s Pentium 4C @ 3300 Mhz : 1h 36mn 14s Dual Xeon (2 x 2800 Mhz) : 1h 00mn 19s As always with Vue, the AMD architecture is used more efficiently. It would be interesting to have an Athlon 64 result. Note that Vue 5 Esprit seems limited to 2 threads. Vue 4 Pro uses 4 threads on the Dual Xeon (2 physical CPU + 2 logical CPUs with hyperthreading), but Vue 5 uses only 2.

Thanks for sharing. I take it for granted that the OS is the same for each CPU?

Yes, Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 for everyone. XP1800 with 768 MB, XP2400 and Dual MP with 512 MB, P4C et Dual Xeon with 1 GB.

The Sponza scene uses global radiosity, and the ultra mode is the highest quality mode but also the slowest, so it is a worst case scenario. It is obvious that no one uses radiosity nor ultra mode in animation. And video frames are never rendered in 1024 x 768, but 720x576 or 768x576 in PAL format.

Any tips an manufacturers of Dual CPU motherboards? The one my usuall suplier has have no sound, no agp, no raid no firewire....

Hellborn: for my dual xeon workstation I always used SuperMicro motherboards. They have a good price-quality relationship, and in my experience with them (8 years with different models) I never had any problems (maybe I'm lucky). The original case is hugly, but if you look for power and quality they can be a good choice (not easy to find, at least in Italy)

The benchmark was ran on a Dell Precision 450 Workstation. For individual boards Tyan make good products, IWill and SuperMicro are good choices too.

Tried Sponza off Vue 5 disc on Dual Opteron 64 Workstation @ 2.4 GHz (Opteron 250 X 2). 1024 X 768 @ Ultra rendering to Screen: 0 Hrs 44 Min 15 Sec. Not bad.

Still very bad for my project. I need 10 min or less.

which is something you wont get from any 3d application atm on a single computer. if you need render times like that you need a real render farm regardless of software.

It does matter each machine cost about $1,000 to $6,000

"Still very bad for my project. I need 10 min or less." At that resolution??? (1024x768 ultra)? Come on man, send your stuff to a renderfarm then. "It is obvious that no one uses radiosity nor ultra mode in animation." Radiosity is rarely used for animation even with high end apps on a network render farm. Usually, GI is either faked or... in some cases... rendered with photon mapping or light mapping technology, where GI is calculated much faster than with Radiosity.

Also, when GI is used in animation, it's usually rendered in an application that can preserve the initial calculations to a file, and then simply "add" to that original solution at each frame, instead of calculating all over again from scratch. Makes for a much faster GI solution over multiple frames where the camera is in motion. Otherwise, GI is faked using ambient occlusion techniques, or professional light rigging. :-) Direct lighting is still the fastest, and most widely used lighting meathod for professional use. Although true GI does look better.

dont know, feels like gweb wants the moon and the stars without paying for it. its impossible for you to get that kind of performance gweb without a render farm, so if you need that kind of performance to butt in and buy a software, outsource, if you cant afford to outsorce your 3d work or invest in a renderfarm and your to impatient to wait for the renders then im sorry to say that you shoudnt be doing 3d. yes a render farm is expensive, but you just cant get that kind of performance in any 3d package out there, without a big renderfarm.

Gweb; Can you build them yourself? I certainly didn't spend that much on my renderboxes, and they are more than adequate. Much of the overhead Vue and VuePro seems to need relates to the GUI and the viewing panes; a Vue4 Cow ran stable on an old Athlon 700 with 384 megs of PC-133. Slow, but stable. At Newegg, for instance, their cepmobo bundle of the week is a Biostar microATX with an AMD Sempron 2200 and fan/sink, for $89. It has integrated audio (useless for a renderbox, so off it goes), and video, which would be more than adequate for the minimal function you'd need. It also has a built in 10100 ethernet port. A stick of Kingston 512meg PC-2100 is $80 A Western Digital 40gig HDD is $56 A Micro ATX case starts at $13 A floppy drive is $7 A CD Rom is $15 (and you only really need one; you can move this between boxes for the OS install; after that use a USB stick or the network to move patches and like) A Power Supply starts at $12 That's only $272 for one box. And not from the cheapest vendor. Load Win2kPro, use XPlite to yank all the trash out, and you have more than enough horsepower. That $1,000 will almost buy you the 4 external boxes you need to start with. Assuming you have a Cow on the system that has Vue on it as well....something I'm starting to seriously look into changing). As for time improvements...I just finished a 900 frame sequence, 30fps, rendered 640x480 in broadcast mode, in a little under 16 hrs in Vue4 Pro. And the ballsiest box in my garden is an XP-2500 on a Gigabyte K7 board with a gig of DDR-266. The rest of them are XP1700 to 1900, with 512 or so megs; most running 20gig ATA-100 drives that have been recycled from old boxes.

DaleB is da man! ;-) That's actually a great little package for a starter farm, and you can always build on it from there. Relatively low cost, and very efficient. Excellent advice, Dale. Gweb, if you're a "serious" animator like you have said you are, then investing in a little farm that you can build on is the best thing you can do for yourself. Will end up saving you so much time and money in the long run, you'll wonder how you ever did without. Plus, once you outgrow the current farm, it's nothing to add a couple more boxes on, or upgrade the ones you have, whichever is more cost-efficient. ;-)

maxxxmodelz I am aware about the layers trick. Excellent advice DaleB. I want to point something out that Vue can be wasteful. Poor renderer speed performance in VUE may require more CPUs. 900 frames for 16 hour considered unreasonable to me. I could get more frames out of Carrara with same renderfarm.

DaleB A tip you probably want to put on list Network and bootable HD for entire renderfarm.

I forgot to mention that I had the volumetrics enabled for the atmosphere, with a pretty heavy overcast to get a more even illumination. The scene consisted of 2 figures (Dacort's Naga and Handspan Studio's 'Amelia' morph for Judy)...well, 3 figures. Digiport had a contribution as well... :P. One dynamic hair prop (Hmann's ponytail) and a dynamic cloth prop (Nerd's summer dress). Tropical water on the ground plane (so there were a lot of rays being thrown to the 'horizon'), a couple of cloud planes, 2 Sonneratia, a monstera, and 2 reeds. No wind but plenty of breeze, so there was some serious vector calculation being done at the time (I was definitely pushing things to see what penalties volumetrics added, and was pleasantly surprised). And yeah, I left off the network stuff and the KVM switch ($40 on pricewatch for a 4 port switch), as that could get into some configuration issues, depending on the OS and skill of the networker. And the bootable HD is an excellent idea, with the caveat that your hardware is identical over the farm...I need to check into that one some more for the nitty gritty... I will be among the first to admit that Vue isn't as fast as the higher ticket packages...but I also didn't spend 4 digits on it. The VuePoser combo is definitely the poor man's alternative, with the penalties to match... But then, I be poor, man.... :P Actually, my next step in this process is building a 5th box in the rendergarden, doing a dual install of Poser and Vue onto it, and using -it- as the rendercontroller. That way I can build a scene on my main box, shift it over to the garden and turn it loose, then start on the next while a render is in process. -That- little enhancement will speed things up considerably in itself (and I've already planned for the issues that would arise regarding mismatched pathnames in the .vue and .pz3 files; just mirror my resources onto multiple partitions in the controller box, and use Partition Magic to rename the partitions, so that they have the proper virtual identification).

Hmm, after reading GWeb's posts about Carrara being faster than VUe, I decided to give another go to Carrara. I did a quickie test and actually found out that VUe renders almost 40% faster than Carrara 3. I wonder if they've improved rendering spoeed in the latest release?

Did you export entire scene from Vue to Carrara? Gene

I have a programming idea to give away. Because I know that this business idea won't last very long and its not worth my time. "Layers with Displacement/Normal Map" (L.D.N.M.) Benefits: It would save alot of rams and speeds up the renderer. The lights and colors will reflects the LDNM and its intsenity along with the texture map. No 3D poly or matrix calculation would be required for this. LDNM is for animator who just want to put mutiple layers in the scene. It lacks the real 3D calculation and may not be needed for some scenes or projects.

"I have a programming idea to give away. Because I know that this business idea won't last very long and its not worth my time." Gweb, your idea is confusing. Vue doesn't do micropoly diplacement or normal mapping that I'm aware of. Are you talking about incorporating these into the software somehow? What do you mean by "layers" for animation? When I think of animation layers, I think of rendering in multiple passes and compositing them in a post-production video editor like Combustion or AfterEffects. Vue doesn't have the ability to render in passes, so the process in Vue would be more complex and time consuming. Some layers, like specular and reflection, would just be impossible to isolate in Vue. "No 3D poly or matrix calculation would be required for this." What do you mean by this? When you use normal maps or displacement maps, you still have geometry in the scene. It's just not as complex as it's made out to be from the normal maps and displacement maps.

With mass of 3D poly can be CPU resources hog. 2D image of normal/displacement map uses less 3D poly and use less CPU resources in 3D matrix calculation. 3D poly should be only used as guided poly in 3D space for textures/layers. They always can convert mass poly into fewer poly as long as if the models look ok. With LDNM, when the renderer get to a pixel; it picks up the poly face and then it work on all layers within the poly area. Displacement/Normal map is very detail and faster than a model with mass 3D polys. Displacement/Normal map is only peak pointers with intensity and the light sources hits it and convert it into 2D image process as texture map. A model with mass 3D polys is wasteful resources and drain on CPU because of matrix renderer scripts have to deal with all the complex numbers in 3D space to determine which color it should make for a single pixel. LDNM is basically a scissors script like post-production video editor but still with some 3D polys. LDNM Renderer calculates differently on 3D poly and used it as for light sources for the displacement/normal map in 2d image process. It may cut down poly when not needed because the displacement map can cover it.