Hardware question; will my ordered Quadro FX 560 speed up Combustion 4?
by claesbas
on
Feb 16, 2007 at 7:08:47 pm
Hello all,
Heard alot of good things about these forums (this is my first post).
I find my Combustion 4 to run very slow. A few images in anmation, some blur and a few glow and everything is processing through syrup.
I just bought a new computer and at the time I clicked order I wanted to dig some more into which gfx-card to buy.
What I bought was this:
Intel Core 2 Duo 2x2.4Ghz
4Gb 800Mhz ram
400gb 7200 rpm HD
Running Windows XP x64...
At the moment I use the simple integrated graphics on the ASUS P5B-VM motherboard which I know ain't very fast.
Yesterday I made a daring ebay purchase and got a Nvidia Quadro FX 560 graphic card. Do you think this will help alot in my setup which is what I guess a pretty strong setup and should be well enough for Combustion.
OpenGL doesn't work at all now. That will probably work with the new Quadro board. Does OpenGL do alot of performance difference?
Is there any Windows XP x64 issues that might slow things down or do you think my integrated gfx is the bottleneck..?
Re: Hardware question; will my ordered Quadro FX 560 speed up Combustion 4? by Dean DeCarlo on Feb 16, 2007 at 9:05:03 pm
Some may disagree but in my experience the graphics card counts for very little. I hardly ever use OpenGL mode. Only to rough out movement on simple objects and even then it's not completely necessary. A consumer Nvidia card such as the 7900 GS which I have works very well. I don't think the few additional unlocked features in a Quadro card will do much good for C. For high end 3D work perhaps. Better to put your money in to more cpu(s) and more memory.
Re: Hardware question; will my ordered Quadro FX 560 speed up Combustion 4? by claesbas on Feb 16, 2007 at 9:25:19 pm
Thanks for your reply.
Okey, thats a shame. I did put CPU and RAM on the top of the list when I bought the computer (thats why I left the gfx-card for later). A Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 with 4Gb of 6400 DDR2 (800Mhz) RAM is what I thought was quite decent workstation. Todays compositing applications does really need raw computer-power it seems...
What kind of high-end workstations does it take to get an application like *C to perform fast?
Re: Hardware question; will my ordered Quadro FX 560 speed up Combustion 4? by claesbas on Feb 16, 2007 at 11:39:36 pm
Well, I got abit fooled by my system. (Been running a overall quite slow system without knowing it for several days).
It seems my ASUS motherboard has som serious issues with 4Gb of RAM. If I disable remapping in BIOS making my computer only find 3.2gb of ram makes it run ALOT better.
I can put out a warning about ASUS P5B-XXX models. No functional BIOS yet for 4gb+ ram.
I will however follow up on how the Quadro performs comparing to this integrated thing.
Re: Hardware question; will my ordered Quadro FX 560 speed up Combustion 4? by Dean DeCarlo on Feb 19, 2007 at 5:18:49 pm
Are you using the /3gb switch in Windows? That will allow C and other apps to see 3gb of memory. Unfortunately that's the max you get. My new system is similar to yours (6600, 4gb ram) and it runs rings around my 3 year old dual Xeon box. However, it's been obvious for a long time that with internal software tuning C could be a whole lot faster. I wonder if that will ever happen.
Re: Hardware question; will my ordered Quadro FX 560 speed up Combustion 4? by DoctorSney on Feb 24, 2007 at 5:42:07 am
I'm running COmbustion 4 on a P4 3Ghz 800FSB w 2GB Ram and an NVS 280 graphics card (it's by Nvidia but the card is basically for accountants). OS is XP SP2. (what can I say, my kids crap away my technology budget...)
Combustion has always run slow on my machine, so it should do much better on yours, but even I can work acceptably (barely) keying 4:2:2 HD frames (1920x1080).
I agree that the graphics cards aren't really making much of a difference to 2d compositing, and the software renderers frequently produce better results especially on machines with fast processors. I ordered a Quadro 550 for the workstation of one of my clients, and this machine ran much faster in software mode, though it did have a pair of Dual Core 3.2Ghz Xeons.
In general I'm finding combustion to be pretty unstable, eg I've been working 14 hours straight, with a crash every 20 minutes, so you can imagine the frustration. However it's toolset is superb, particularly for keying, so I just plod away and save frequently.
