[dece]

OK Mac peeps, here is your chance to win one for the team and really wrap your brain around a tricky technical question.

I am a web developer for a largish PC-only company in Microsoft's back yard. We have a particular vice president convinced, upon our supplying this information, to buy us a G5 dual 2.0. Assume this will be out of the box with its 512 MB of RAM.

Our mission is compiling a short movie with LightWave 3D 7.5. Our current equipment is a G4-500 PowerBook with 1 GB of RAM.

It takes us 30 minutes to render one frame. for the comparison we will be rendering 60,000 frames. It takes the G4, therefore, 30,000 hours.

The question I need answered, quick and dirty, is about how long will it take the G5?

Pencils up. Begin.

P.S. If anyone has a G5 Dualie and LW 7.5 and wants to do a render-off, that would be good too!

[Eug]

Dunno, but for Cinebench:

iBook 500 scores 45
G4 450 scores 50 (1 CPU in dual CPU machine)
iBook 600 scores 59
G4 867 scores 80
TiBook SD 1000 scores 93

...and the Dual G5 2.0 scores 516

[Gankdawg]

Originally posted by Eug:
...and the Dual G5 2.0 scores 516

Holy she-ought!

[billybob128]

i would like to help but i dont know the ropes in rendering or have lite wave 3d. however i can tell you that there is one hell of 2 fast processors in the dual2 if you want me to try and help give me the go ahead and ill look into it

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by dece:
P.S. If anyone has a G5 Dualie and LW 7.5 and wants to do a render-off, that would be good too!

Is the source file large? I have a dual G5 with 1GB of RAM and would be happy to benchmark it for you. I think we have LW 7.5. PM me if interested.

[///Milien]

Here are my Cinebench results from my PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0 with 4GB RAM:

CINEBENCH 2003 v1
************************************************** **

Tester : Milien

Processor : PowerMac G5
MHz : 2.0 GHz
Number of CPUs : 2
Operating System : 10.3.1

Graphics Card : ATI Radeon 9600
Resolution : 1920x1200
Color Depth : Millions

************************************************** **

Rendering (Single CPU): 286 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 499 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.74

Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 273 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 767 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1288 CB-GFX

OpenGL Speedup: 4.71

************************************************** **

[Thinine]

You should get the G5 optimized version of Cinebench, your score will go up.

[Leonis]

Cinebench (the latest beta) is G5 aware but the actual app isn't yet....

So don't expect the speed gain in C4D to be like the G5 awared Cinebench at least until R8.6 or even later.

[bartman00]

If a singel 450=50 and a dual 2ghz G5=500.. then a real rough guess would be about 9-10x faster... so about 3000-4000 or so minuts to render. no?

Bart

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Thinine:
You should get the G5 optimized version of Cinebench, your score will go up.

If he's getting 500 with a dual 2.0 then he has the G5-optimized version of Cinebench. The old version got something like 400.

[freakboy2]

i guess you could ask what your alternative is.. you could probably do a little better than a g5 rendering lightwave with a quad or 8 way proc machine from intel, but then you're spending tons of cash.

i think right now the dual-g5 is about the best price/performance for the kind of rendering you want to do.

as for the actual speed, it'd probably be pretty damn fast.. if it's not fast enough, get 2 of them and start them at opposite ends of the render.

fb

[Mac Write]

I would wait would for the DP 2.6GHZ due out in January.

Can light wave take advantage of muiltiple computers? maybe get 2 DP G5's and that would speed up rendering time even further.

[Link]

No it'd take a single dual 2ghz g5 about 3,000 hours-4,000 hours depending on the optimization..

Keep in mind that's STILL 125 days for one computer.. 125 days = a bit over 4 and a half months = OUCH

two = about 2.5 months

4 = about a month and a week

8 = 2 weeks

16 = 1 week

You get the idea

[bartman00]

OHH.. Hours! sheesh!! Maybe you should call Pixar or something! Dang? what the heck are you rendering again!!

[olePigeon]

Cinebench isn't a good reference for speed since it's not AltiVec enhanced and LightWave is. Maybe some more research on LightWave performance on a G5 is warranted.

[olePigeon]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274637,00.asp

Here's an interesting article by PCMagazine. It has some Lightwave3D benchmarks there. The G5 is pitted against a dual 3.06GHz Xeon and a dual G4.

As you can see the Xeon wedges past the G5.

But look at the Sorenson Squeeze. After you've done all that rendering, even if a PC is marginally faster than the G5, think of the time you'll save on postprocessing! When converting the raw video into MPEG2 or 4 for DVD or video you'll save almost 1/2 the time it would take on the PC.

[TiDual]

Originally posted by Mac Write:
I would wait would for the DP 2.6GHZ due out in January.

Er ... first I've heard of this. More likely is 2.4Ghz, announced in Jan, maybe shipping by March, and I think that's optimistic. Remember, apple just made the 1.8 a dual, because they can barely get enough 2Ghz chips ... I don't see 2.6's being available in quantity so soon. I also don't think the difference in performance will be so great (since bus will probably stay at 1Ghz or less), and other bottlenecks (disk IO etc. don't go up)

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by dece:
OK Mac peeps, here is your chance to win one for the team and really wrap your brain around a tricky technical question.

I am a web developer for a largish PC-only company in Microsoft's back yard. We have a particular vice president convinced, upon our supplying this information, to buy us a G5 dual 2.0. Assume this will be out of the box with its 512 MB of RAM.

Our mission is compiling a short movie with LightWave 3D 7.5. Our current equipment is a G4-500 PowerBook with 1 GB of RAM.

It takes us 30 minutes to render one frame. for the comparison we will be rendering 60,000 frames. It takes the G4, therefore, 30,000 hours.

The question I need answered, quick and dirty, is about how long will it take the G5?

Pencils up. Begin.

P.S. If anyone has a G5 Dualie and LW 7.5 and wants to do a render-off, that would be good too!

Impossible to say. We can't test that for you. 30 minutes to render one frame? It must be a helluva scene, seriously. Without having the same scene, all we can do is theorise, mathematically, which is a recipe for disaster and inaccuracy.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
Impossible to say. We can't test that for you. 30 minutes to render one frame? It must be a helluva scene, seriously. Without having the same scene, all we can do is theorise, mathematically, which is a recipe for disaster and inaccuracy.

geez ciph...

there is nothing wrong with estimating


if you do the simple math on the first cinebench results

50 x 30000 divided by 516 you get 2,900 hours. So estimated:

30,000 on the g4 compared to 2,900 on a dual g5

[freakboy2]

did you get anyone to try out the render for you? I'd do it if i had a g5 and lightwave..

is there anything you can do to speed up your renders? It must be rendering stuff that you don't need for your scene.

fb