Am I right in thinking the big bottleneck, when rendering will be disk I/O?

I got this notion from a bit of advice Stewar gave me in a thread a while back... where he told me to make sure I had texture filtering on, in order to maximize texture caching.

EDIT: Yup... in one of those threads BB just linked to... xpost.

Applying that, along with some heuristics BB explained regarding min shading rate to number of threads ratios, certainly seems to have made a world of difference to my render times.

Avoiding that disk I/O bottleneck means upping the memory, relative to processor, to reduce swapping... or reducing the max thread count in line with available memory... as I understand it.

I have a quad core i7 with 16GB RAM (as this is max officially supported on an imac currently). 32GB would serve me much better...

Although to be honest I already have to stay lower than the max available number of threads now, to avoid meltdown... or what I fear will be meltdown. That and open all the windows and allow some of the Scottish climate to compensate for the heat build up :lol:

An SSD would have helped me significantly I reckon, in addition to this, on the basis that disk I/O is, apparently, a point of bottleneck.

But I just couldn't justify the extra cost of that... least not in the mac, for a hobby machine.

2GB Graphics card in the imac has made a huge difference in terms of responsiveness, for actually working within the Poser UI, in OpenGL preview mode.

Obvously you have massively more choice going the PC route... and less horrendous pricing... although there really is no substitute for good quality parts I would say... and avoid any false economy wherever you can!

You can probably build a much better piece of PC hardware than my imac, for about half the money, I'd guess... without resorting to using cheap parts.

The bottom line for me is that I just like working within OS X a lot more for CG... and for no real objective reason... maybe just that I develop and support apps, primarily on and for MS Windows, all day at work and want a break from it... the mac casing is a slick bit of furniture of course too.

Sure, if SM brought out a Linux version of Firefly and QM (and I doubt they will, anytime soon) that'd be great, I reckon. I could cope with using Linux outside work...

Cheers