can anyone suggest me best hardware configration for combustion
by vinay kumar
on
May 13, 2008 at 3:51:11 am
hi am using 3ds max and combustion with intel p4 duel core 4GB RAM with 512 graphic card .i dont know why its slow i am not satisfied i was looking for a machine which can be faster than this can anybody suggest me a good machine.
Re: can anyone suggest me best hardware configration for combustion by Dean DeCarlo on May 13, 2008 at 2:54:53 pm
It's never fast enough. A Core 2 Duo will be speedier than a P4 Dual but Quad Core's are so cheap I'd definitely opt for one of them. Also as is often mentioned disk throughput or lack thereof can be a factor if you are reading and writing large files. Consider a raid 0 for video files. A good graphics card will help 3dMax but IMO not so much for Combustion. I never use the OpenGL mode in Combustion except for particles and for that my consumer level Nvidia 7900 GS seems perfectly fine. I like building my own boxes but Dell has a decent looking deal here for a $599 quad core with a 20" monitor.
For $900 I built my own box that has a Q9300 quad, 4gb ram, 750gb disk, Nvidia 8600 gt and a lot of extras. It's also over clock-able. It smokes for rendering but still it's never fast enough......
Re: can anyone suggest me best hardware configration for combustion by warren BONES on May 14, 2008 at 2:30:32 am
I disagree on the video card front - I would never run anything other than QuadroFX. Even a cheap one with 128Mb RAM will work better with Combustion than a high-end GeForce or ATI card, because they have good, compliant OpenGL drivers. Combustion uses OpenGL for many things, not just particles [it uses it to draw the GUI, for instance].
As Dean says, any kind of disk array will be big help if you use a lot of layers. I just have two SATA-II drives in RAID-0 and I get much better performance than I used to from a single HDD. Some people will tell you to get lots of RAM but I find it a distraction. I try to limit my cache to about 1Gb so that I don't spend too long sitting around waiting for previews to cache. Combustion is also multi-threaded, so a Quad-Core CPU will also speed a lot of things up.
I'm a contractor for Autodesk at the moment but, unless otherwise stated, all opinions expressed here are my own.
Re: can anyone suggest me best hardware configration for combustion by Dean DeCarlo on May 14, 2008 at 3:02:27 am
Hmmm. I think the GUI is only OpenGL drawn when OpenGL mode is enabled. I never use that mode. One reason is that I get no video preview when it is used. Also limited transfer modes etc. The response is generally so fast moving things around that I don't miss it. It is used for setting up particles and there I have not seen a problem as far as the Nvidia card. Personally I say quad core processor, 3 or 4 gigs of ram and two striped data drives are the ticket but then again I've always thought pricey graphics card were over rated for Combustion. I ran a Quadro for quite some time and didn't really enjoy that much extra benefit. We each have different priorities I guess.
Re: can anyone suggest me best hardware configration for combustion by warren BONES on May 16, 2008 at 12:28:38 am
No, the whole GUI, all the buttons and sliders and the rest of it, are drawn using OpenGL, all the time AFAIK. Its a recent revelation to me but it explains a lot of weird behaviour I have experienced on Mac over the years, with buttons and sliders not drawing properly on dialog boxes and such.
If you are doing a lot of 3D compositing, without RPF or any of that stuff, OpenGL will massively improve the level of interaction, too. I used to do a demo from a game FMV that had four or five layers and the whole thing ran real-time from the time I loaded up the footage until I started to use some of the RPF stuff [which doesn't show up with OpenGL, so I had to turn it off at that point]. I was moving, scaling and rotating layers whilst playing back at full frame-rate.
I wouldn't even try to use Combustion without a QuadroFX card and the 540 in my workstation was less than $300 18 months ago, so its not a huge expense. Its the compliant drivers that make the difference, more than the grunty hardware.
I'm a contractor for Autodesk at the moment but, unless otherwise stated, all opinions expressed here are my own.
