[rescue] using blender alone is going to be painful

[Shawn Wallbridge]

The new renderer that we are moving to (Exluna's Entropy) is heavily
multithreaded. When we run it on our 8way, it pegs all the processors. It
really flies on our new Dual 1.5GHz Athlon render slaves. We are very
impressed with Entropy, it is really nice. The developers are great to deal
with and we have had very good output from it. We just bought 60 seats
actually.

3DSMax is also somewhat multithreaded (it's not the best, but it does use
most of the second (or eighth) cpu). I don't know if the UI is multithreaded
or not, but the renderer is. But that only runs on PeeCee's.

shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Joshua D Boyd
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 11:39 PM
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [rescue] using blender alone is going to be painful


On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 12:02:51AM -0500, George Adkins wrote:

> *Sigh*, yet again, software without the ability to use the horsepower of
the
> machine it runs on. <shakes head>
> If there's no multithreaded support, what was the point of porting this
> software to IRIX in the first place?

Most heavy weight rendering software runs the same way.  PRMan at Pixar?
Last I heard, they were using 14 processor suns, and running 14 instances
of the renderer on each machine.   There really isn't much point in making
a render network capable then threading it.  Performance benefits would be
minimal.  About the only major benifit is conserving RAM.

The point of porting the software to Irix was because the guy original
started
it on Irix as a masters (or was it PhD) project.  A few studios want to be
all
Irix.  Others want to keep their expensive workstations working when the
animators go home at night.

BTW, Blender has an irix port because that is where it originated back when
3D on a PC was a joke.  B

--
Joshua D. Boyd