Sylvain wrote:
>> 35 blades total with 14 dedicated to nuke (old
ones that doesnt have enough ram and power for arnold)
>> recycle your old blade for comp! ...
just jumping in
I am surprised about this – as we do the exact opposite.
we prioritize the best renderblades for Nuke, most with
24Gb ram, some more – and about any old blade will do for 3D
rendering. (10-12Gb is plenty)
the logic is that -during working hours- the rendered
composite is what artists are actually waiting for to move
their work forward – while 3D sequence rendering can usually
plough on in the background. We’ve verified the 3D render on
a few stills (that can even be rendered local if the artist
so chooses) so we don’t really lose time waiting on the full
sequence.
we’re using Deadline, and something we really push with
Nuke rendering is “concurrent tasks” – so each blade is
rendering several frames at once – at which point having a
lot of ram is crucial. This reduces total task time almost
linearly – eg 4 tasks at once means the total render of a
sequence will be almost 4 times faster.
Another factor is that nuke rendering puts more load on
the network – so we rather have a small amount of very
performant blades for that, and a large amount of less
performant ones for 3D rendering.
Something which no doubt comes into play too, is that we
are not doing beauty rendering – so we have a lot of
discreet passes, none of them very slow to render – in
return, our comps are more demanding, with the simplest of
shots having 30 odd passes.
So yeah, best blades for compositing here all the way.
As for Leoung’s original question – for 3D rendering, you
can never have enough cores – assuming your renderer uses
them well (which mr mostly does) – so I’d be tempted by the
32 cores. That’s double the 16 cores – it’s bound to make a
real difference. Only downside is that for those tasks that
aren’t multithreaded you have a lot of cores idling.
Wouldn’t it be cool if they designed these muticore
machines with one “master” core, that would have very high
clock speed, and a lot of “slave” cores that kick in for
multithreading? Fast pre-render + fast render =
.
just my 0.02 eurocent.
