Priorities for a workstation and the other things.

[Shaolee]

Hello.

For a month or so, I've tried to understand what sort of system I should get, now that I've decided to buy a new computer. Hardwear is a real jungle to me. I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I've tried to talk to the sales people from various companys. Maybe it's me maybe it's them. But I still don't get it.

I work as a 3d generalist and a compositing artist. Doing just about everything. I use Maya, Nuke and After Effects on WindowsXP. So I know that I need a pair of XEON processors to render. Then I understand that I need lots of memory since I always run out both when comping and doing 3d (I have 2GB right now). I now that I need a bunch of hard disk space. And I know that I need a graphics card wich is ggod. So far so good.

Now to what I don't know. When it comes to graphics card. I have used both highend gaming cards and low end Professional cards. I don't notice any difference. What is the difference. When would it be a good idea to get a Quadro FX 3700 instead of a Geforce GTX 285?

The speed of the Front Side Bus 1300 or 1600 and how does that connect with memmory speed and CPU speed?

Then there is the hard disk configuration. I was thinking 1 300GB Veloci Raptor and 3 to 4 1TB disks with raid 5. I have understood that a raid is what I need for playing HD and bigger (4k). Is there any difference between a raid in the computer and an extrenal besides that you can hook up more computers to an external. The external ones are a whole lot more expensive. I have seen that raids are mesured in mb/s. How fast a raid do I need for full HD and how fast do I need for 4k? I have tried to figure out the difference between SATA, SAS and SCSI. Would a raid with 4 SCSI drives be as fast as a raid with 8 SATA drives? What is the best cable to transfer the data, USB, FireWire 800, eSATA or fibre? Do I need a raid card either way I go with the raid in the computer or with the external one? And what's the difference between different raid cards besides the huge price difference?

I now that I've asked alot of questions. But if you can answer one of them I will be a bit better prepared atleast. And since I'm not the first one to have these wonderings (I think), others might find the thread interesting.

/Calle

[alkali]

You don't need a pair of Xeons or Opterons necessarily... you basically just need/want as many fast cores as you can get on your budget. Server-class CPUs are expensive. I would recommend looking at i7's.

Video card: Consumer (or "gaming") level cards actually use faster cores than the professional cards, but they aren't as accurate in terms of drawing in 3D space. Hence their widespread use in CAD and drafting (where accuracy is king). They used to be the only kinds of cards that supported OpenGL, but this is no longer the case, and the "gaming" cards (once again, I use this term loosely) support it just as well these days. Basically, the so-called professional cards are overpriced and only have significant life left in them thanks to the drafting industry and the lack of hardware understanding fostered by most people (no offense to anyone).

Bus: In short, get a fast one. The fastest one you can within your budget. If you're connecting 8+ cores to 16+ gigs of RAM, you want each core to be able to move as much data as possible at all times, especially when caching geometry (for rendering) or processing images (for comp renders). Unfortunately this is still the main bottleneck in any power system.

[Shaolee]

Thanks for the reply Alkali!

The kinds of graphic cards being pretty much the same sounds realy great. Since the consumer card is alot cheaper (and is better for gaming). Is the professional card not even better for playing through scenes with lots of polygons? Like for example a scen with tons of instances? What type of accurucy do you meen? Does the shaders materials look more like the renders? If I for example do smoke with fluids, will I see a better representation of the smoke?

Realy good what you wrote about the FSB and the RAM. There's just one thing that still confuses me. If I have a 1600Mhz FSB and 800Mhz RAM won't the RAM be kind of a bottleneck? Or perhaps it doesn't have to be as fast as the FSB?

[forkazoo]

I think one of the biggest differences between Quadro and GeForce is in Wireframe. With my GeForce in Lightwave with very heavy models, I get about twice the framerate with textured+shaded mode that I do in wireframe mode. It's counterintuitive that wireframe would be that much slower, but it is.

Also, the high end Quadro cards support SDI, which none of the GeForce cards do.

There are other differences, but if I had oodles of cash, those would be the two main things in my mind.

[Shaolee]

What's good with SDI? It seams from looking at wikipedia to be a not very usefull feature. Anyway I think it's safe to say that I'm going with a geforce.

[segfaultii]

Please tell us your final configuration and price, I'm very interested what you come up with.

edit: spelling

[Shaolee]

Sure. Will do.

[Shaolee]

So then it's just the raid thing left. Anyone know anything about raids? I realyze that the difference in price is huge but if it's an external raid array that I need. Then that is what I'll get.

[alkali]

You don't need an external RAID array. You'll probably want some kind of redundant external backup and archiving system, which may turn out to be a large RAID 5 or RAID 10 array, but for internal/day-to-day use, a good-sized RAID 10 array on top of a 10k rpm hot working drive should be more than sufficient.

And forkazoo is right about wireframe views in workstation vs. consumer video cards (forgot to mention that ). The workstation cards are significantly faster in wireframe mode than the consumer cards (supposedly this has something to do with the way they handle back faces).

[Aruna]

RAID is dependent on the throughput of your system. It's only as fast as the slowest bottleneck. Even if you have RAID5, you have to make sure that the information coming off of it will go through your system quickly enough to be viewed on your monitor. Not only that, you have to make sure that if you do get an external RAID5 array, the connection to the rest of your system should be just as fast. That is, you don't want a RAID array and run it through USB or Firewire. You'd probably want a SCSI or eSATA connection.

On top of all this, OSes can only support up to a certain amount of RAM, so be sure and pick up a 64bit operating system, XP 64 or Vista 64, I think OSX can already address over 4GB of RAM, as can all *nix setups. Re: FSB and RAM speeds, ya, you'd probably want go get similar speed items, or else one is waiting for the other. I think the new i7 architecture may do away with Front Side Bus, but I can't recall. It has been a while since I've been doing hardware.

I've been a fan of SCSI for a long time. If I were still doing freelance compositing and 3D, a SCSI RAID system would be high on my list. Fibre Channel is even faster, but that speed is not necessary for the majority of people.

Here's a ghetto way of calculating.. a 2K cineon file is around 12MBytes. If you want to play that realtime at film speed, you need a bandwidth of 12MB times 24 = 288MB/s. USB2 has a max of 60MB/s, Firewire 800 has 98MB/s, while eSATA has 300MB/s. So I'd choose eSATA right off the bat. U320 SCSI (what I had) is 320MB/s. Enough to stream 2K cins at film speed (24fps). As well, the video card has to have the ability to keep up with that video stream from disk. RAM helps the streaming.

Now, all this goes out the window if you're not doing film compositing in realtime or don't want to play back native 2k.

[Aruna]

Wanted to add a link to a manufacturer that I've used at almost all the companies I've been to.

BOXX
Performance Comparison

[segfaultii]

what do you run on these workstations? xp64? fedora/ubuntu?

[Aruna]

Depends. At home I use XP Pro 64. At various work locations, it's been Fedora Core, Debian, and Red Hat, and IRIX. The only thing that I've never used extensively in a work environment is OSX.

[Shaolee]

Thanks alot Aruna!

It's begining to clear for me now. I was thinking of going with the XP64 since I find the Linux that I have tried (Ubuntu) to be not as userfriendly as windows wich I'm comfortable with.

Would the bandwidth have to be twise the size if I were to comp together 2 images of the same size? Lets say that I have 2 2k cineon sequences each of them needing 288mb bandwidth to play?

I think most of us want to do our work in realtime if it's possible.

Anyway thaks for making it clear to me!

[Aruna]

Compositing isn't a real time effort, even with a fast system, unfortunately. There are some graphics cards which do the image calculations on it, as well as buffer the images in RAM, so it can display in real time (and putting less stress on the HDD throughput). With 1GB video cards out there now, real time playback of large images shouldn't be a problem anymore.

If you want to play back two 2k image sequences at the same time, then ya, your bandwidth is effectively doubled. HOWEVER, if you're laying one image over the other, the overhead won't be your disk speed or system speed, but the mathematical operation of putting that one image over the other. In that case, it may depend on your graphics card, and whether your software is taking advantage of the hardware.

This was where SGI reigned supreme in the late 90s early 00s, the machines had a unified system architecture between video, RAM and disk, so the throughput was very very good. The software (FFI) took advantage of the hardware system, and you were able to do some pretty quick simple compositing work. Of course, adding keying adds another layer of complexity.

In terms of compositing efficiency and playback, here's a quick rundown of what's necessary to view a stream of 2K uncompressed cineons in realtime. This is of course, just a stream of composited images, not images that you are currently compositing.

-)HDD system capable of streaming 288MB/s without overhead. (Some systems have error correcting and code in the stream)
-)enough system RAM to effectively cache said stream. (to compensate for HDD slowdowns and other activities) the more the better. XP32 can only address up to 4GB.
-)video card powerful enough to display 2k images (RAM onboard will help cache frames).

With this setup, you can stream 2k cineons to your hearts content without running into a wall. 3GB RAM will hold about 10 seconds of 2K imagery, while the HDD pushes information into RAM. You will of course, have some system overhead, programs resident in memory etc. You will definitely hit that limit on a XP 32bit box with 4GB of RAM.

Hopefully this will give you some idea. I would definitely look at a complete package as opposed to building your own right now..