[b-kandor]

Well, someone has to figure this out - I for one would relish an excuse to buy a bunch of ps3's. How hard is it to compile maxwell to run on the cell?

[ivox3]

Hi all, after looking at what seemed to be slowing down my machine I found it was first the read/writes to hard disk first - apparently a U320 Fujitsu 15K drive is not fast enough. So I created a ram drive and made maxwell load/render there.

Next up - I found that writing the preview image to the screen slowed things down a fair bit. So I turned off the preview - Still writes out the exact same image at the end of the render.

My question is, is the render time still valid. It was:

12m17s

and the Maxwell benchmark

816.4

3DBob

All is fair in love and war, ....benchmark test too.

Do you have a previous time without the adjustments?

** The bottom line is that we're all very interested in ANYTHING that makes for a quicker render, ...so who would really give a damn if the test results kind of 'skewed' the overall data --- we'd still want to know.

[thxraph]

isn't there anyway to contact the Cell man? he is probably a demo user, so can't post, if you read this man, drop a mail pllzzz

EDIT : anyway, it would be cool to add "gentoo - stage1" on the list, cause i'm pretty sure you can't install a stage3 on a PS3, you have todo it yourself, and in fact, it is better like that, even if you need some knowledge

Raph

[simmsimaging]

This may be a dumb one, but I really couldn't get a sense of it from a forum search: if the PS3 is workable it's obviously a great potential option - but how is the Linux version of Maxwell working? Is it running okay or is it buggy?

b

[Mihai]

But Maxwell is not compiled to run specifically on the Cell processor, it will most likely just run on the PPC component of the Cell.

[ivox3]

so is it a fake entry or not .....?

[ivox3]

You know what else?

The absolute best bang for the buck is the Q6600 --- Look at numerobis' benchmark 20m 03s and then there's Bubba's score of 12m 25s. I know its obvious, ..but I can build a Q6000 system for $600, ...versus $ 4000-7000+ on some of these 8 core systems. The scaling just isn't there...(per dollar scaling, I mean).

If I had to do it all over again, ....I'd build 4 quad systems vs. the single 8. Just my thoughts, ...as I see no one is really mentioning it ......

[simmsimaging]

If I had to do it all over again, ....I'd build 4 quad systems vs. the single 8. Just my thoughts, ...as I see no one is really mentioning it ......

You know - I'm glad you did mention it. I am hovering on the edge of buying two new systems right now, and I am beginning to think you are right. What holds me back is the idea that I am trying to maximize the amount of cpu power into 4 computers to fit my Maxwell license - but maybe it's not worth worrying about it that way. I really need to think it over - but thanks for pointing out what should have been pretty obvious

b

[mgroeteke]

... and i think this rendertime & benchark is possible, but would like to see a proof, otherwise i'll have todo it by myself, cause that is the cheapest ultra powerfull rendernode i've seen, the cell is a monster, and all the cores are in the same chip, it is far faster than have 2x4cores for exemple.

Raph

hehe, maybe apple did the wrong thing when moving away from IBM to intel...

markus

[Tim Ellis]

But Maxwell is not compiled to run specifically on the Cell processor, it will most likely just run on the PPC component of the Cell.

Is it a viable option though, to have a Cell specific build of Maxwell?


Cheers,

Tim.

[Mihai]

But in 1-2 years it will become irrelevant anyway.

[numerobis]

PS3 teraflop cluster!

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store ... lutions]=1

...but these solutions are not very cheap


installing linux on ps3:

http://www.ps3grid.net/install_linux.php

so it could be possible to run mxw on ps3. but the problem is the 256mb ram. not very much. but there seems to be a solution to use usb sticks as ram. but how fast could this be?
first benchmarks running x86 programs on ps3 are not very promissing... but maybe there is a chance to optimize it?!? >>>terrasoftsolutions

real-time rendering on ps3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34 ... ed&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEg7q2lk ... ed&search=

[sandykoufax]

6 Node PS3 Cluster

$21250.00




pinkSky's system has 4GB and he's cpu clock is 3GHz.

Is that possible too?

[Bubbaloo]

Adrian, can you please take my previous entry off? I have beat my previous time and benchmark. I set threads to 1024 (thanks to the testing done by others) and cleared the img and mxi writing slots. I will be overclocking soon so it may change again hopefully. Thanks!

[numerobis]

@Bubbaloo: nice bench

did you check the memory usage with 1024 threads? would be interesting to see how it scales. and also if there is a difference to 48 or 64 threads, because i checked the windows threads in taskmanager and they seem not to be endless disposable. ~63 threads was the max value i got.
setting only 48 threads i got ~550mb of ram usage instead of 160 with 4 threads. so with "real" scenes setting high thread numbers would be not really useful i think. so it would be a unrealistic bench value. i considered adding my result with 24 threads to the list but this one needed ~330mb ram so i think it's not possible to use this setting with bigger scenes. so i think i'll not change the result.