G5 at Siggraph
Hi Guys,
I thought this might be interesting. It's a report from a www.highend3d.com maya forum visitor - seems like more or less correct info, given the fact that it comes form a forum that traditionally puts SGI and Wintel on a pedestal:
(snip, snip)
Shake looked cool. Surprisingly, Apple's booth was not set up as a marketing facade as most booths are. No sales guys, demo pods, or marketing materials. It was a classroom set up with a demo guy leading folx through different excercises in Shake. Product spoke for itself. VERY impressive (and refreshing).
And, then there was Pixar using Renderman on a dual G5 to render out a frame from Nemo. Renderman will only be available on and is completely optimized for the G5. Demo guy told me that it would be a waste of anyone's time/$ to do it on the G4. So I asked him (only being half serious) if Pixar was ditching their Sun renderfarm for the G5 and he said if Apple doesn't screw up, everyone will be rendering on the G5, its that fast. Renderman/G5 beta starts as soon as the machines ship.
(end of snipping)
(original thread: Siggraph repport)
So I guess the G5 is indeed where we had hoped it would be.
Cheers,
BaRa
I thought this might be interesting. It's a report from a www.highend3d.com maya forum visitor - seems like more or less correct info, given the fact that it comes form a forum that traditionally puts SGI and Wintel on a pedestal:
(snip, snip)
Shake looked cool. Surprisingly, Apple's booth was not set up as a marketing facade as most booths are. No sales guys, demo pods, or marketing materials. It was a classroom set up with a demo guy leading folx through different excercises in Shake. Product spoke for itself. VERY impressive (and refreshing).
And, then there was Pixar using Renderman on a dual G5 to render out a frame from Nemo. Renderman will only be available on and is completely optimized for the G5. Demo guy told me that it would be a waste of anyone's time/$ to do it on the G4. So I asked him (only being half serious) if Pixar was ditching their Sun renderfarm for the G5 and he said if Apple doesn't screw up, everyone will be rendering on the G5, its that fast. Renderman/G5 beta starts as soon as the machines ship.
(end of snipping)
(original thread: Siggraph repport)
So I guess the G5 is indeed where we had hoped it would be.
Cheers,
BaRa
Comments
Not exactly marketing genius, but then again who wants to demo non-optimized software on a beta OS for a group of CGI freaks.
Apples booth was very wierd they just had power macs and were giving shake and final cup pro demos, they had one G5 and it was open so you could see inside, but no one was showing off the G5 or working on it.
Jason
Originally posted by iplead5th
There was one G5 at the mac booth, but nothing was really going on there. There was also one at the some art institutes booth. But by far the best showing was at pixars booth. They had renderman running on it and also were showing pixlet. The only problem is that currently they only have the software to render on the mac, so there is no integration with maya. Yet there are some other programs that can generate rib files for you and then you could render it. Im sure when the final project comes out it, they will finaly have MTOR and the other artist tools for the mac. The only thing was that most of the pixar people, when asked questions about the G5 and renderman, did not know the answers and refered me to the guy who ported the software, who I could never find. I think they run renderman from X11 because there is no renderman logo in the dock, and on the window in which it was rendering was an X window. The guys, at the booth, from pixar had one major concern about the G5 as a workstation and it was because of the lack of pro graphics cards, and that the mac always gets the old graphic card tech. ( I found this a little odd because of two things, one I thought the geforce 3 came out on the mac first, and also because there is not that much differance any more between the pro cards and the highend game cards.
Apples booth was very wierd they just had power macs and were giving shake and final cup pro demos, they had one G5 and it was open so you could see inside, but no one was showing off the G5 or working on it.
Yeah, Apple had one G5 at their booth and it was really odd how the Apple reps did not even talk about it.
I still think there is quite a bit of difference, howver, between the game cards and the high end Quadros when you are working in Maya. The Nvidia demos at SIGGRAPH were really impressive. The lack of high end graphic card support will be a definite problem for the Mac.
The blooming of 'X' with Panther and the G5 obviously deciding factors. As are X-serves/Raids...and whatever else Apple has up their sleeve.
And I don't think it will be long before we see 2.5 gig G5s.
What price a quad version?
As for the graphic card issue. For most things, I'd have thought the power of the latest Nvidia and Ati mainstream cards like the 9800 Pro would more than suffice. They're awesomely powerful and only set to get more ridiculously so.
I've heard Elsa makes cards with drivers tuned to Studio Max and have heard of high end cards with increased texture memory and drivers 'tuned' to apps like Maya.
Personally, I think it's only a matter of time before Apple approach Ati/Nividia for a 'pro' class card.
But surely the differences such as 'full' Open Gl, having no GL support (remember those Formac 80 days with Quickdraw 3D, groan...) and no antialiasing are behind Apple and consumer cards. And look at the amount of polygons these new cards can shift...and the programability of the cards. Should see cards helping render dazzling effects in real time in the next year or so?
People must remember, Pixar issued a statement in late June saying they'd think about it. Now they're talking about DOING it..! For real. They must be really impressed with the G5. Though the 970 is an impressive chip...look at the bandwidth you get for each chip AND up to 8 gigs of memory...and the Ace: it runs on a Mac Os! Unix class OS!
Apple have only just got started by the looks of things. I'd love to see Apple round out their high end software by buying Maya. But I guess...they don't have to! With Maya, Luxology, Newtek, Maxxon and Renderman and Kaydara on the Mac...who cares about Max and Softimage? Apple have got most of the heavy hitters.
3D on the Mac? Never looked this good. I remember what it was like five years ago. It wasn't pretty.
Lemon Bon Bon
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
But surely the differences such as 'full' Open Gl, having no GL support (remember those Formac 80 days with Quickdraw 3D, groan...) and no antialiasing are behind Apple and consumer cards.
Apple's OpenGL is a "full" implementation -- fuller than most, actually. The video cards they are getting from nVidia and ATI are now fully capable, if not completely maxxed out. Apple certainly could use the chipsets they're already getting and build a top of the line card. Getting the drivers fully optimized is probably the single biggest issue remaining.
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
I remember what it was like five years ago. It wasn't pretty.
Lemon Bon Bon
Well spoken El B.B. , we're in a whole new ball game ...
he X2-256 will also ship with hardware rendering plug-ins for Discreet 3DS Max, Alias Maya and Softimage|XSI. These allow 3D modellers and animators to see their work rendered in real-time, according to ATI, through the instant processing of DX9 HLSL and GL2 shading languages. This process is designed to help modellers and animators work more efficiently ? as the number of renders required in an average project is reduced as users have a much better idea of how their work will finally look.
Ati news link at the above address.
Drivers are the issue here. I'm sure, like mentioned above, Apple could cook their own 'pro' graphic card. Considering what they did with the chipset for the G5...it could be well tasty.
Apple have come along way and I'm sure the next five years will make the last five look more like a footnote in history. The most exciting stuff is yet to come methinks.
Lemon Bon Bon
Originally posted by Lemon Bon Bon
www.digitmag.co.uk
Ati news link at the above address.
Drivers are the issue here. I'm sure, like mentioned above, Apple could cook their own 'pro' graphic card. Considering what they did with the chipset for the G5...it could be well tasty.
Apple have come along way and I'm sure the next five years will make the last five look more like a footnote in history. The most exciting stuff is yet to come methinks.
Lemon Bon Bon
What are you smoking? Will you share with me??
Apple does not design hardware much anymore, especially something like a pro-grade video card. They don't have the expertise, or the practice, for such an endeavor. Sorry.
A friend of mine put a geforce 4 titanium in his MDD and doesn't notice any difference in performance from our Quadro cards in the PCs at work.
Originally posted by yzedf
Apple does not design hardware much anymore, especially something like a pro-grade video card. They don't have the expertise, or the practice, for such an endeavor. Sorry.
Huh? Excuse me, but your comment only applies to leech computer makers like Dell. Apple does design their own motherboards and other pieces of hardware, including video cards using nVidia chipsets.
Originally posted by Bill M
Huh? Excuse me, but your comment only applies to leech computer makers like Dell. Apple does design their own motherboards and other pieces of hardware, including video cards using nVidia chipsets.
yup
go to arstechnica for hanibal's interview with the g5 guys from ibm
apple had a lot to do with the design
Apple does not design hardware much anymore,
Huh?
I think you have mistaken them for Dell. 8)
Originally posted by ryukyu
Actually, I've heard for a while now that the nVidia and ATI cards that are in Macs are the equivalent of the pro cards for the PC. That is, all of the OpenGL functionality is there for the Mac.
A friend of mine put a geforce 4 titanium in his MDD and doesn't notice any difference in performance from our Quadro cards in the PCs at work.
I've heard this is true as well. The consumer cards from nVidia and ATI are really the same as the pro cards except that they have certain functionality disabled on the board. Some of the nVidia boards can be turned into pro boards simply be adding or removing a resistor. Last I heard the Mac boards were equivalent to the PC pro boards, except possibly in terms of the amount of VRAM and speed of the chips. From the look of the specs, the new Mac ATI 9800 is the same as the PC ATI 9800 Pro (edit: just noticed that a 256MB PC version is available, but this is mostly only good for showing up your neighbour).
The latest "workstation class" FireGL uses the same GPU as the Radeon 9800, by the way. The only real difference is the 256 MB of DDR-II VRAM vs. 128 MB of DDR-I VRAM. The amount of VRAM will make a noticable difference only in very very heavy pro use, and the DDR-I vs DDR-II difference will improve pixel rate as long as the pixels you are drawing aren't too complicated and you're at very high resolution (which is why they do that on the pro boards). Even so, the current pro cards will smoke the workstation cards from last year.
Who knows, maybe ATI will "bless" the Mac drivers to work with the FireGL cards -- since they are the same hardware it would probably be almost trivial to do so!
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Cheers,
BaRa