Buying Nuke: what Hardware to use?

[Stringkeeper]

Hi!

I'm planning to buy a whole new system with up to date hardware and- of course -software witch is Nuke, 3dsmax and Combustion. (I want to move from combustion to nuke.)
So, for combustion and max i'd like to use a windows pro 64 bit system and a ati (HD 2600) card (ATI cards works best with combustion for me). BUT will nuke be running on this machines? I heard rumors that nuke has problems on a consumer card und there seems to be strange behaviour on 64 bit system.

Does anyone, running nuke, know these issues?

Thanks for your help

Sebastian

[donat]

When Nuke was still at Digital Domain, I remember trying an evaluation version on a workstation with an ATI card. That didn't work well at all. The OpenGL didn't work, so for example the connection lines in the DAG were not displayed at all. With an NVidia card it worked fine

I don't know if this has changed since The Foundry took over. But unless someone tells you that he works with an ATI card and has no problems, I'd go for an Nvidia card.

Donat.

[Stringkeeper]

Thanks for the reply. so did you use a consumer or pro card?

Anyone else got experience with nuke on 64 bit and ATI Card?

[Hugh]

Have you tried contacting The Foundry directly?

[donat]

I'm only using consumer Nvidia cards with Nuke.

[Stringkeeper]

Ok great, thanks.

Yes I contacted them, but i think its also quite useful to know what issues people in production environments face with nuke and specific graphics hardware. But it occures nobody ever used nuke on 64 bit?! I had quite some problems with the demo (icons not displayed.....)

If anybody else got some advice....your welcome

[Diogo Girondi]

Avoid ATI as much as you can in Nuke, even the higher end ones. ATI is famous for not working as it should with it. Go with any nVidia Quadro FX that you'll be in better grounds.

C* OpenGL implementation is not that great and will (should) behave the same with nVidia boards.

As for Windows XP 64 as far as I know it works without any problems even tho I'm running it on Win XP 32 and planing to switch the Nuke stations over to Linux.

[donat]

I'm running it on Win XP 32 and planing to switch the Nuke stations over to Linux.

May I ask why you're planning to go to linux ? Is there a special benefit apart from not having to pay licenses for Windows ?

[hugo_guerra]

May I ask why you're planning to go to linux ? Is there a special benefit apart from not having to pay licenses for Windows ?

In Linux Nuke will "see" up to 3Gb of Ram (In WinXP32bit and MAC OSX it only can "see" 2Gb) also Linux is proven to be a faster OS and with less "stuff" on in the OS using CPU power.

Another good reason is that most advance tools are running Linux:

Fusion, Inferno, Flame, Flint, Smoke, Rotor, Houdini, Maya, Shake.

So in a linux you can use a bigger mix of applications, just to give an example, in a Linux box you can use the 3 best compositing tools around, Shake, Fusion and Nuke.

All of best

[throb]

In Linux Nuke will "see" up to 3Gb of Ram (In WinXP32bit and MAC OSX it only can "see" 2Gb) also Linux is proven to be a faster OS and with less "stuff" on in the OS using CPU power.

with the 3gb switch you can have nuke access 3gb in windows32. generally you can get away with 2gb on comps. many many films have been done with 2gb and not going into swap.

you can cut out all that crap on windows if you choose.

fusion runs in an windows emulation state btw, from my understanding. why bother?

rob

[ShadowMaker SdR]

fusion runs in an windows emulation state btw, from my understanding

What do you mean by this? As far as I've been told it runs on Linux natively.

[throb]

What do you mean by this? As far as I've been told it runs on Linux natively.

i believe they were running it in a windows emulator like wine. it does it for you but it still runs in emulation. that's how they got all the AE plugins to work

[nathan]

While I haven't used Fusion on Linux I believe it only uses the Wine libraries for the UI elements, this is not a Windows emulation state. It's like a gui toolkit. While most people often refer to Wine for running Windows applications under Linux it does have other uses than that.

Softimage is the poster child for horrible Linux ports. Its MainWin library is utterly horrible and the general cause for most problems. XSI is so damn picky on which distribution you use and what version. Why is it that every other major application such at Shake, Nuke, Maya, and Houdini could care less about about these things? Most of the time your answer is because they are not using some hackjob of a library like MainWin.

It really comes down to personal choice for why you run ANY operating system. Why do you run Windows or OSX? Sometimes yes you may run an operating system because that is the only supported system for an application but generally speaking you do it out of choice.

Yes you can cut the crap out of Windows and make it some what leaner. That however isn't my reasoning for running Linux and neither is not having to buy a Windows license.

You want 10 small reasons for why I prefer Linux?

1. Basic scripting in just a lot easier in Linux.
2. The command line. Because lets face it the Windows Shell isn't that powerful.
3. Python, Perl, and a whole bunch of other languages come installed by default on a Linux system. Setting these up on Windows can be a PITA at times.
4. The user land environment of Linux is a lot better then Windows. Where and what is stored for each user is easier to manage then how Windows operates.
5. Managing installed and not installed software through Synaptic is infinitely better then Windows Add/Remove.
6. Setting up a development environment is easier than Windows. It is also easier to maintain your development sources and libraries because of the package managers.
7. Sym links actually work and aren't half broken like in Windows.
8. If part of the system breaks I have the option of uninstalling and reinstalling it. Explorer some how got corrupted? Time to reformat.
9. Some of my applications just run better under Linux.
10. Because I just like it

Those are my reasons and I perfectly understand that someone might not feel the same way.

[ShadowMaker SdR]

While I haven't used Fusion on Linux I believe it only uses the Wine libraries for the UI elements, this is not a Windows emulation state.

I'm not a technical expert, but this sounds a lot like the explanation I was given.

[nathan]

Pretty much. Although if I remember correctly Fusion on Linux will open AE plugins and Windows Fusion plugins. I know the website says this.

We have also developed our own specific version of Wine to host cross platform compatibility for such things as plug-ins and to ensure correct operation in mixed OS environments.

Without knowing much more those situations might be using some type of emulation.

I remember there was a discussion on this board when people found out that Fusion uses Wine for the Linux port. Someone from Eyeon explained it wasn't using emulation and that it was just for the gui. Heres the post - link.

I don't know about that though, if you are loading plugins that were compiled on and for Windows how can you not be doing some type of emulation? Thats the only part I think they need to clarify. They also haven't stated if that is how you create plugins for the Linux version of Fusion. Do you just create Windows plugins and not worry about Linux because it will run them emulated or can you create fully 100% native Linux plugins.