Ultimate Rendering System for Terragen ???

Started by cyphyr, March 17, 2007, 04:10:55 PM

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dhavalmistry

Quote from: VorpalBlade on March 26, 2007, 01:01:44 AM
dhav, you single handedly reduced my system to a pocket calculator, I'll never feel adequate again  :'(

dont feel bad...my computer is no faster then yours.... ;)
"His blood-terragen level is 99.99%...he is definitely drunk on Terragen!"

DiscoBall

$1000 could get you a PS3, and if that works out well, could be quite a good 8 core workstation :P

Cyber-Angel

Technically speaking the "Cell" processor in the PS3 is capable of parallel processing my understanding is that some cancer research scientist's what to do with the PS3 what the SETI institute did with the PC, and that is use PS3's not been used by there users to play games (Down Time) and make use of the "Cell" processors' in them to do Anti Cancer Research.

If TG2 where capable of parallel processing then you could take advantage of the processing power in the PS3 if you designed your software architecture to do so then you could have a type of render farm, maybe.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

mrwho

disco, technically it'd be 6 cores, b/c 1 is like a back-up kinda thing and the other is reserved for the OS, but it'd still be nice.

old_blaggard

Well, keeping it realistic... an 8-core Mac Pro was just released using a special Xeon processor at 3Ghz, which makes it arguably the fastest personal workstation on the planet right now.
http://www.terragen.org - A great Terragen resource with models, contests, galleries, and forums.

king_tiger_666

If CPGPU was developed enough to allow consumers to use it,TG2 would render quite fast. especially using something like a 8800 generation core



<a href="www.hobbies.nzaus.co.nz/">My  Terragen Downloads & Gallery</a>

DiscoBall

Mm yes, 6 cores, but still, that's 6 dedicated cores, since on PC if you use single core it's still running your OS :P

CPGPU...eh...fun indeed..

Oshyan

A PS3 (Cell) "core" is not at all the equivalent of a general purpose core on for example a Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2 CPU. Just something to keep in mind. ;) PS3 probably *would* make a good render machine, but it's hard to say just how it would compare a good dual or quad core machine. It's not likely that we'll be supporting PS3 any time soon though.

- Oshyan

Moose

Quote from: Oshyan on April 09, 2007, 04:54:22 PM
It's not likely that we'll be supporting PS3 any time soon though.

Blast! :P Well, not so much PS3 but Mercury's PCIe Cell Accelerator Board - http://www.mc.com/products/productdetail.aspx?id=2590&ProductTypeFolder=56 - looks really tasty too... except for the fact it's $8K. But still, nice to see this sort of thing happening - at least the option is there if you are a pro with the budget to match.


The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) is a PCI Express® accelerator card based on the Cell Broadband Engine™ (BE) processor in a package designed for high-performance environments. This comprehensive user-programmable solution offers order-of-magnitude faster processing for graphics, image, and signal processing workloads. Performance scales dramatically when the application is distributed across multiple Cell Accelerator Boards in a cluster or across the network.

Mercury has mapped key algorithms onto the solution, significantly increasing the performance advantages for high-performance computing applications.



There's always dreaming for the rest of us. :)

Oshyan

Hehe, and right there lies the problem. PS3 costs $600 and has a Cell processor at a higher clock speed (3.2Ghz), albeit with only 6 cores available for processing (as opposed to 8 on the Cell Accelerator Board). Still, for less than 1/10th the price you can get an overall siimilar performance (or perhaps slightly less). The main differences are in the fact that it's a separate unit, not a board in your computer, and in the software. But bottom line I'd sooner see PS3 support for rendering through major apps than support for that thing. I do wonder if anything worth mentioning even supports it yet too. Cell is not an easy thing to take advantage of and even big development houses like Autodesk would have to invest significant resources to get for example Maya rendering properly on it.

- Oshyan

Moose

#40
Quote from: Oshyan on April 28, 2007, 01:32:56 PMCell is not an easy thing to take advantage of and even big development houses like Autodesk would have to invest significant resources to get for example Maya rendering properly on it.

Some developments - http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200708/07-070E/index.html - Sony will be showcasing their new "Cell Computing Board (prototype)" at Siggraph - a board designed specifically towards "computer graphics and scientific computations". It looks like they'll have Houdini running on it - http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/b2b/broadcast_production/display_systems/release/31008.html - Hopefully it wont be too long before other players jump on it also - not much use if it stays niche and priced at a gazillion dollars (assuming that's currently the case??).

All we need now is to get TG2 locked and out of the door as soon as pos so the guys can start recouping some money, hire more hands, and get Tezza running on something like this...

:)

Edit: Looks like mental images have got in on the act too - http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/b2b/broadcast_production/display_systems/release/31006.html :)

mrpiddly

is terragen multi threaded and is it 32bit or 64?

Oshyan

It is not yet multithreaded and is currently 32 bit. The render engine will be multithreaded before release and we do also hope to provide a 64 bit version.

- Oshyan

old_blaggard

Just out of curiosity, how could 64-bit help enhance the program?  It would obviously make much more RAM available for those of us who need large object populations, but would it also help improve render speed?
http://www.terragen.org - A great Terragen resource with models, contests, galleries, and forums.

Oshyan

It is possible it could help improve render speed. Most rendering these days requires fairly high precision and the calculations could be done faster in 64 bit I would think (I could be way off base on that though ;D). Also simply having access to more memory could speed heavy scenes up a lot, of course. Only time will really tell how these possibilities pan out in practice.

- Oshyan