I just finished building a Dual Opteron 275 workstation (with a Tyan S2895 K8WE motherboard). As expected, V5i runs very well on this system and uses all 4 cores for rendering. I hope this information will be useful to those who are planning to build or buy that kind of system for rendering purposes. I overclocked the CPUs from 2200 to 2400 MHz (hypothetical Opteron 280) with nTune software from NVIDIA, with no stability problem at all. Here is the Sponza benchmark, 800 x 600, ultra rendering mode, render to screen : 22 mn 33 s (1353 s). This is on Windows XP Pro 32 bit. I'll try the same on Windows XP 64 in a few days. Hopefully we'll see a 64 bit version of V5i in the future. There is already a 64 bit version of Cinema 4D, which increases rendering speed by 20%. V5i could use that kind of improvement :)

Ironically I just asked for recomendations for system specs a couple of days ago in the Lightwave forum and the exact same hardware was suggested as a great combo. I'm comparing prices with my account balance to see which is bigger. I'm not familiar with the Sponza file, can you compare it with a generic P4 or provide a link to benchmark comparasons? BTW, Lightwave has a 64bit version ready, and will be a free upgrade. (Hint, hint to the Vue marketing types....)

Message edited on: 07/07/2005 15:33

Great subject! I'm hoping to have the bucks for such a system this winter. Also hoping by then any major WinXP64 bugs/driver problems are worked out. Of course, I want to see rendering speeds go way up. But, what I really want to see is greater memory usage. I want to load at least 6 GB of ram in that thing, and see Vue use AT LEAST 2/3 of it. Don't forget to let us know what happens when you get XP64 loaded. :)

Seems to be a great combo. I thought about getting a Athlon 64 X2 system at the end of the year. Maybe a bit cheaper. Anyway it would be great to have a 64bit version of Vue5I. Memory was an issue and always will be.

I installed V5i on XP64 without problem, the Sponza scene (ultra, 800x600, render to screen) renders in 22 mn 48 s instead of 22 mn 33 on XP32 (1% difference so almost nothing). At the original frequency (4 x 2200) the time is 24 mn 31 s. Here are some results for a few other computers : Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1.53 GHz : 2 h 01 mn 34 s (1 cpu) Athlon 64 3400+ @ 2.4 GHz : 1 h 09 mn 29 s (1 cpu) Pentium 4C @ 3.2 GHz : 1 h 06 mn 06 s (2 cpu, hyperthreading) Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz : 43 mn 22 s (4 cpu, hyperthreading) However, since it is not a 64 bit version, the memory allocation problems are still there. Even with 4 GB of memory (which XP64 uses happily, XP32 sees only 2.75 GB), I had an 'Out of memory' error when creating a 8192 x 8192 terrain... Cinebench 2003 64 bit results are also impressive, with a score of 1359 (19.4 s) for the multi-CPU rendering test @ 4 x 2400 MHz (1105 and 23.8 s with the 32 bit version). Now I am beginning to think that a 64 bit version of V5i is really needed...

Yes louget, we have the hardware and the operating system based on 64bits now. If Vue5I wants to keep up with the professional software (C4D, Lightwave,...) it's time to launch a 64bit version. They really should do this till the end of the year.

I appreciate the info. I'm thinking about building a dual core AMD 64 X2 within the next few months. I was very curious about the interaction of Win64 and Infinite. I'm not holding my breathe on a 64 bit Infinite. I'd expect it to be coming out when Microsoft releases Longhorn . . .

Don't hope for Longhorn. What Microsoft does regarding DRM to any user who doesn't need DRM is outraging. E.g. they want to encript all traffic between graphic driver and graphic card to avoid sniffing, which leads to a high system load. Longhorn requires thus a lot more resources than XP and that doesn't help us 3D artists at all. I'll stick with XP64 as long as I can...

realy nice performance there for the dual opteron, thanks for posting your results for the sponza scene.