Hi All,
I am sizing up the current generation of workstations with plans to build a workstation that is optimized for both RF and, by extension, the animation/modeling projects that employ RF. looking around the forum I've come across a number of topics that brush on this but am surprised that there isn't a pinned thread with some details of what to consider (i.e. hyperthreading vrs number of CPUs vrs RAM etc) when shopping out a RF system. in my case I am hoping to strike a balance between price/performance and expandability. I've narrowed in on Intel E5-2600 family of CPU - seems like these offer the best balance of the above considerations, but I might be missing something (?). what is confusing if the different configurations of multi-core CPUs. my limited budget allows for perhaps a single 8 core CPU vrs maybe a dual 6 core. if I give a little on CPU speed then I have more money left over for other options. perhaps a lesser chip with massive RAM is the way to go. maybe a small hotrod system with a farm of render nodes is even better. another question is whether RF take advantage of system cache. I've seen one system that suggests that a SSD dedicated to cache will offer serious boost to certain apps. thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions.
-frank
Hardware Recommendations for RF
Re: Hardware Recommendations for RF
Narrowed down the choices some, but plenty of options left to suss out. looks like a RF sim hits the CPU pretty hard. still not sure if the overhead of a dual CPU rig outweighs the benefits here. but in the name of expandability I am looking at the family of 2600 xeons over the i7. I am going to go with the fasted 8 core single chip I can squeeze out, with the hopes of upgrading to a dual chip setup down the road if that will help. the dual socket asus Z9PE-D8 WS mainboard maxxes out RAM at 256GB so there's plenty of room to grow from the 32GB I will start out with. I see that the RF 2013 will offer limited support for GPU. so a single nvidia tesla GPU paired with a quadro video card seems to offer some future bump. the choice of which quadro card is still up in the air. looking at the 4000, 5000, 6000 cards, the amount of onboard RAM jumps slightly from the 4000 to the 5000 (2 to 2.5GB) and then greatly with the 6000 (6GB.) I can save on the 4000 and maybe double the system RAM or push to 6000 and wind up with a slower CPU. not sure where best to spend yet. any thoughts out there? what am I missing? thanks in advance!
-fip
-fip
Re: Hardware Recommendations for RF
I have an AMD Phenom II 2.3Ghz with 6 cores that I bought 2 years ago. It's starts to slow down as I get about 50 thousand particles in the shot. I've never used Hybrido but I can definitely use it for simple small scale water effects. Try to get as many CPU cores as you can. You'll notice that all cores are used by the RF software, but they will not peg CPU use at 100%. I'm not sure why and have never gotten a straight answer out of Next Limit. The extra cores will definitely help you during render time if you use Lightwave, 3D studio Max, or any of the other 3D packages RF works with. My renders are super fast compared to my old computer.
Good luck,
P.S. If you are looking at an Intel Chip, check out the equivalent chip from AMD. You'll get about 97% of the performance, but for much less money. Much more bang for the buck with AMD.
Good luck,
P.S. If you are looking at an Intel Chip, check out the equivalent chip from AMD. You'll get about 97% of the performance, but for much less money. Much more bang for the buck with AMD.
Re: Hardware Recommendations for RF
I'd go with Intel for heavy simulation work. Some of AMD's current CPUs are fast when calculating int values , but slow down when it gets to floats.
If going for the Xeons, I'd consider putting two Hexacores in the box. I doubt Realflow will scale well over more than 12 real cores. Those CPUs are very expensive and maybe a single i7-3960 or an i7- 3930K (the latter is way cheaper but also performs veery well) with 24GB RAM will be sufficient, anyhow.
Maybe instead of buying a Dual- Hexacore Xeon, and spending lots of money on expensive Xeon Hardware (RAM, Boards...) you should consider buying two i7 machines. Even though a Dual Xeon is a bit faster, you will never be able to parallelize your tasks when working on a simulation. Think of all those iterations and all those "I wonder how that might work with a little more Surface Tension"- situations. Plus you can use IDOCs. I think two slightly slower computers are always better than one that's a bit faster.
For orientation, this chart is nice:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
GPU- wise I am no friend of Quadros in VFX. It is overpriced hardware, targeted much more at people in CAD and engineering, who might need the extra precision and lots of speed in ProEngineer and the likes. Save the money and go for a good GeForce, 2GB RAM or more. In my opinion, GPU has become a bit of a marketing buzzword, recently. Yes, there are those GPU real time demo renderers one can see at every trade show. Cool stuff, I really like that. There are also plenty of videos on YouTube around where GPUs are doing crazy things in lab situations. Software like Nuke also uses the GPU to accelerate things in the background, but that works fine on a GeForce, too. Apart from that (and well, yes, computer games) I haven't seen that much improvements in off- the- shelf software that could convince me to buy a Tesla. GPUs have much more potential and there will be the time for it, but unfortunately, this time hasn't come, yet. There are still too many limitations plus you currently cannot do anything on a GPU you can do on a CPU.
Realflow 2013 will probably have (limited) GPU support, and I am really looking forward to it, but this will also work fine on a GeForce:
http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/siggrap ... SB127.html
If going for the Xeons, I'd consider putting two Hexacores in the box. I doubt Realflow will scale well over more than 12 real cores. Those CPUs are very expensive and maybe a single i7-3960 or an i7- 3930K (the latter is way cheaper but also performs veery well) with 24GB RAM will be sufficient, anyhow.
Maybe instead of buying a Dual- Hexacore Xeon, and spending lots of money on expensive Xeon Hardware (RAM, Boards...) you should consider buying two i7 machines. Even though a Dual Xeon is a bit faster, you will never be able to parallelize your tasks when working on a simulation. Think of all those iterations and all those "I wonder how that might work with a little more Surface Tension"- situations. Plus you can use IDOCs. I think two slightly slower computers are always better than one that's a bit faster.
For orientation, this chart is nice:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
GPU- wise I am no friend of Quadros in VFX. It is overpriced hardware, targeted much more at people in CAD and engineering, who might need the extra precision and lots of speed in ProEngineer and the likes. Save the money and go for a good GeForce, 2GB RAM or more. In my opinion, GPU has become a bit of a marketing buzzword, recently. Yes, there are those GPU real time demo renderers one can see at every trade show. Cool stuff, I really like that. There are also plenty of videos on YouTube around where GPUs are doing crazy things in lab situations. Software like Nuke also uses the GPU to accelerate things in the background, but that works fine on a GeForce, too. Apart from that (and well, yes, computer games) I haven't seen that much improvements in off- the- shelf software that could convince me to buy a Tesla. GPUs have much more potential and there will be the time for it, but unfortunately, this time hasn't come, yet. There are still too many limitations plus you currently cannot do anything on a GPU you can do on a CPU.
Realflow 2013 will probably have (limited) GPU support, and I am really looking forward to it, but this will also work fine on a GeForce:
http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/siggrap ... SB127.html
Re: Hardware Recommendations for RF
thanks for the feedback, guys. some things to think about.
oldcode, I was an original AMD fan - the first machine I built was based on a AMD DX80 at a time when Intel's best offering was a 40 mHz chip. but over the years I have seen that with certain complex software, it is better to run it on the same hardware platform that the software was developed on.
Florian, that's an interesting point about the twin i7 approach. I'll have to mull that one a bit. I am also going to be doing some heavy lifting in 3D rendering and video production. having two machines is always a nice option. but I do believe that RF sims are way faster if the scene can exist in available RAM. I saw somewhere that an typical RF scene eats up most of 24GB and I certainly plan on working up scenes that are more complex than *typical* Perhaps losing the GPU and budgeting in a 1u "farm" with two CPUs will keep me in production. I do believe that GPU will make a big difference in the coming years. but that's why I'm buying a scalable system and picking which areas to push and which to pull.
-fip
oldcode, I was an original AMD fan - the first machine I built was based on a AMD DX80 at a time when Intel's best offering was a 40 mHz chip. but over the years I have seen that with certain complex software, it is better to run it on the same hardware platform that the software was developed on.
Florian, that's an interesting point about the twin i7 approach. I'll have to mull that one a bit. I am also going to be doing some heavy lifting in 3D rendering and video production. having two machines is always a nice option. but I do believe that RF sims are way faster if the scene can exist in available RAM. I saw somewhere that an typical RF scene eats up most of 24GB and I certainly plan on working up scenes that are more complex than *typical* Perhaps losing the GPU and budgeting in a 1u "farm" with two CPUs will keep me in production. I do believe that GPU will make a big difference in the coming years. but that's why I'm buying a scalable system and picking which areas to push and which to pull.
-fip