Has anyone seen a SmokeLinux Demo?

[Anonymous]

If so….. what are your thinkings about it??..here in Spain we will not able to see it until march…maybe february.

I would love to hear opinions from you guys!!

Bye for now 😀
FlameFX

[Anonymous]

flamefx wrote:

If so….. what are your thinkings about it??..here in Spain we will not able to see it until march…maybe february.

I would love to hear opinions from you guys!!

Bye for now 😀
FlameFX

well, if it’s based on xfree and some kind of standard gfx card you don’t wanna see it 😆

[hyrlvlrec]

i was able to jump on one for about an hour, it was just as fast, and just as responsive as my octane2 dual 600 smoke6HD……………. in the dve, CC, and rendering sapphire sparks

[Iggs]

I’ve sat through the hands-on demo at NAB 2004 and found it to be quite slow …
Don’t know what machines they were running it on so that might have been part of the problem … I work mostly on Avid|DS so can’t really compare it to Smoke on SGI but IMHO it was slow: had only a few layers in Action and just trying to rotate/scale … etc. took quite a bit of patience.

I.

[Anonymous]

hyrlvlrec wrote:

i was able to jump on one for about an hour, it was just as fast, and just as responsive as my octane2 dual 600 smoke6HD……………. in the dve, CC, and rendering sapphire sparks

good idea to compare with 3 year old hardware 😉

[hyrlvlrec]

well, i really havnt heard much good about tezro performance gains over the dual proc octane2, unless youre speaking of the 4cpu tezro 4 obvious reasons

[Anonymous]

hyrlvlrec wrote:

well, i really havnt heard much good about tezro performance gains over the dual proc octane2, unless youre speaking of the 4cpu tezro 4 obvious reasons

i’ve heard too much to recall.
but it doesn’t matter what somebody has heard.

have used it, talk about it.
haven’t done so, don’t talk.

[Keyser_Soze]

flamefx wrote:

If so….. what are your thinkings about it??..here in Spain we will not able to see it until march…maybe february.

I would love to hear opinions from you guys!!

Bye for now 😀
FlameFX

We’ve tried it both at IBC and a private demo. It’s responsive enough. For price/performance ratio it is really good. I don’t think that discreet are gonna sell very many flames after this. But you’ll probably want burn as well to cut rendering time. There is one catch though as burn currently does not support multiprocessor machines so you will need more machines, more licences… expensive. Discreet said it had something to do with Open GL (i think). It sounds weird to me that they can’t support multiproc. machines. I heard a rumour that it could be fixed in a future upgrade. Anybody knows?

Iggs wrote:

I’ve sat through the hands-on demo at NAB 2004 and found it to be quite slow …
Don’t know what machines they were running it on so that might have been part of the problem … I work mostly on Avid|DS so can’t really compare it to Smoke on SGI but IMHO it was slow: had only a few layers in Action and just trying to rotate/scale … etc. took quite a bit of patience.

I.

Don’t think you can run Flint/smoke on any other machine (apart from SGI) than specified by Discreet: “Dual Xeon™ IBM® IntelliStation™, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, NVIDIA® Quadro FX 3000G, real-time 4:4:4 ITU-R 601 PAL/NTSC video I/O, with audio break-out box”.
I don’t think it was THAT slow, it was ok, not superfast but ok. You will want burn though.

Cheers.

[Anonymous]

Keyser_Soze wrote:

Iggs wrote:

I’ve sat through the hands-on demo at NAB 2004 and found it to be quite slow …
Don’t know what machines they were running it on so that might have been part of the problem … I work mostly on Avid|DS so can’t really compare it to Smoke on SGI but IMHO it was slow: had only a few layers in Action and just trying to rotate/scale … etc. took quite a bit of patience.

I.

Don’t think you can run Flint/smoke on any other machine (apart from SGI) than specified by Discreet: “Dual Xeon™ IBM® IntelliStation™, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, NVIDIA® Quadro FX 3000G, real-time 4:4:4 ITU-R 601 PAL/NTSC video I/O, with audio break-out box”.
I don’t think it was THAT slow, it was ok, not superfast but ok. You will want burn though.

Cheers.

well, NAB demo should be the correct machine 🙂

[Xavier]

Keyser_Soze wrote:

There is one catch though as burn currently does not support multiprocessor machines so you will need more machines, more licences… expensive

You CAN run Burn on dual proc machines. We are doing so at my company. However, not everything in Burn is multi-threaded (just like FFI). When you hear that burn doesn’t support multi-procs, it’s because all the OpenGL stuff is rendered through a library called MESA on Burn, and this library is NOT multi-threaded. However, sparks like Sapphire sparks DO use both CPUs in your render nodes.

Anways, Burn is expensive. 🙂

As for Linux products, I sat at a Flinux demo at siggraph and in NTSC, flint felt “regular speed”, definitely not slow. Also, a few freelancers that worked with me played with Flinux at a Discreet event in Paris and were impressed with the interaction speed. Apparently the desktop was quite fluid, etc… I wouldn’t be surprised if Flinux beat a Tezro for CPU intensive operations like sparks. Anybody did benchmarks already?

— Xavier

[Keyser_Soze]

Xavier wrote:

You CAN run Burn on dual proc machines. We are doing so at my company. However, not everything in Burn is multi-threaded (just like FFI). When you hear that burn doesn’t support multi-procs, it’s because all the OpenGL stuff is rendered through a library called MESA on Burn, and this library is NOT multi-threaded. However, sparks like Sapphire sparks DO use both CPUs in your render nodes.

Well I didn’t say burn wouldn’t run on multiple processor machines. It’s just sad burn doesn’t use their full power. Have you ever heard of 3d renderfarms that does not support multi-procs?
Lets just hope that Discreet will work some more on mult-threading, until then we just have to buy more machines, ie. more licences. I just can’t wipe the image of Discreet “laughing all the way to the bank” from my mind.

Quote:

Anways, Burn is expensive.

Yes, from the beginning Flinux looks very nice pricewise. But adding all the things you need to get a decent setup it always ends up more expensive than you first expected. Sounds like Discreet doesn’t it… 😉

[Xavier]

Keyser_Soze wrote:

But adding all the things you need to get a decent setup it always ends up more expensive than you first expected. Sounds like Discreet doesn’t it… 😉

Actually, sounds like everything I ever bought! Car, appartment, cable, internet, computers, TV sets, etc… 🙂

But out of curiosity, since Flint is supposedly a “turnkey” system, besides a few Burn nodes, what do you need more?

— Xavier

[patdawg]

Quote:

Well I didn’t say burn wouldn’t run on multiple processor machines. It’s just sad burn doesn’t use their full power. Have you ever heard of 3d renderfarms that does not support multi-procs?
Lets just hope that Discreet will work some more on mult-threading, until then we just have to buy more machines, ie. more licences. I just can’t wipe the image of Discreet “laughing all the way to the bank” from my mind.

You kids need to read up on OpenGL. Rendering OpenGL effects is done on the video card inside of the Burn nodes, not the processors. There’s no such thing as multithreaded hardware-based OpenGL rendering. Also, we just got smokeHD on a 4-proc 800MHz Tezro, and it is a hell of a lot faster than the Octanes or Linux machines.

[Xavier]

patdawg wrote:

You kids need to read up on OpenGL. Rendering OpenGL effects is done on the video card inside of the Burn nodes, not the processors.

You need to read up on Burn rendering. Burn doesn’t use the graphics card to do rendering. It is using the MESA library (http://www.mesa3d.org/) — on the main CPU — to render OpenGL operations.

Discreet doesn’t even talk about graphics cards in their requirements page:

http://www4.discreet.com/burn/burn.php?id=278

Quote from that same page:

“Features an integrated software-based OpenGL renderer”

So before you start being all condescending, kid, do a little research, please.

— Xavier

[Keyser_Soze]

Xavier wrote:

But out of curiosity, since Flint is supposedly a “turnkey” system, besides a few Burn nodes, what do you need more?

Nothing more really. Just a lot of money. 😀

patdawg wrote:

You kids need to read up on OpenGL. Rendering OpenGL effects is done on the video card inside of the Burn nodes, not the processors.

I’ve got no idea how things work really. And I don’t care. I want things to be as fast as possible and if I hear something doesn’t use the machine to its full potential I want it to be fixed. I pay for it.

[Author]

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