Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by Kenneth La Rue on May 9, 2008 at 1:02:24 pm
Vinay
Are looking for a machine that will be use just for rendering or are you planning on running programs on it. It makes a big difference as to what you need if it will just be for rendering.
Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by warren BONES on May 12, 2008 at 12:49:47 am
It will depend on the kind of stuff you are doing. If you are using a lot of layers, hard-drive performance may be more important. I have a Shuttle which is not much bigger than a shoe-box but has 3 drives - one system and two in RAID-0. It also has a QuadroFX card so its a good all-rounder. I do get heat-related problems with it on a hot day but most of the time it is very reliable. I also have a carry-case for it so it is ultra-portable.
I'm a contractor for Autodesk at the moment but, unless otherwise stated, all opinions expressed here are my own.
Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by shin kurokawa on May 12, 2008 at 3:27:38 pm
Actually, the memory stuff is a bit complicated.
For example, in OSX 10.4+, c4+ even though
it's a 32bit app, can allocate ~3.5GB of memory
for itself. If a machine has 16GB+ RAM,
it, an instance of c4 RQ, AE, AE render
engine... can all be run at the same time with
very little paging/swapping.
In XP32, things get more competitive in memory
allocations + management -- even if the
3GB switch is used c4 might only get a couple
of hundred extra MB (or much less, if at all)
as opposed to not using that since your graphics
card on PCI will eat up a huge chunk of that space.
I won't go into Vista/V64/XP64 stuff right now
because I just ate.
-Shin
Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by Eric Craft on May 13, 2008 at 1:47:29 pm
As shin said a properly programmed 32bit app can use up to 4gb of ram. You will get about 3.2-3.5 gb in a 32bit OS and pretty close to the 4gb number in a 64bit OS, as long as you have enough ram for any other running resources of course.
Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by Jeff Brown on May 13, 2008 at 2:40:01 pm
So-- am I doing something wrong with XP? I can get about 2.3 GB usage by Combustion in a 4 GB system (using /3 GB switch), max. Suggestions welcome, unless it's "buy a Mac". Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by Dean DeCarlo on May 13, 2008 at 3:01:17 pm
It seems to vary. Your cache is probably set to the default 87% which on my 4gb box with /3gb switch set also yields 2.36 gb available in Combustion. You can raise the cache to 100% which will give you a warning and then 2.7 gig available after restart. You can try that and see if your system remains stable. If you are like me and regularly have other memory hog programs running such as Photoshop, Premiere and even Firefox then the 100% cache is probably not a good idea unless you like to have your system swap like crazy.
Re: looking for good rendering machine which is portable by Eric Craft on May 14, 2008 at 1:55:30 am
It's not Combustion, I have crashed alot of programs as you get close to the /3gb limit, its memory management and getting close to the physical limit of 32bit address space.
