Today, as Chase and I were dutifully Photoshopping footballs into photos that were otherwise footballless, I noticed a particular trend in my Photoshopping technique that can only be properly portrayed, purported, and propitiated in a visual fashion. I present to you the following graph:
Now that the dust has settled from last week’s escapades, I have some time to talk a little about what went on. Long story short, right when we were down to the wire with our last and, incidentally, largest renders we hit XP’s 2GB memory limitation per program with a standard Windows build. Needing a quick and ultimate solution, we deployed a 64bit install of Ubuntu on my Laptop, allowing us to bypass the pesky 4BG memory address space of a 32bit system and PUNCH THE FACE OF GOD with a address space of 16.8 MILLION TERABYTES. These measures solved our problem but kicked our ad hoc render farm down to one machine, so Chase and I spent the next 14 hours monitoring our renders and watching Star Trek IV, Fire and Ice, and Star Trek V. What a way to make a fistfull of cash!
When it came down to it we went with a 64bit build of Linux, not just to kick the tires out from under our memory problems, but because we were curious to find out if we’d pick up a speed boost by lighting up previously unused circuitry in our Core 2 Duos. Well, the wait is over! Last night I took a random test shot from our current projects and rendered it out on a Windows 32bit build, a Ubuntu 64bit build, and the same 64bit Ubuntu build but with an optimized build of Blender I scored at graphicall.org.
The numbers are as follows on my Core 2 Duo (T7250) 2.0 GHz with 3GB of RAM:
Windows XP SP2 Version 2002:
13:41:54
Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 with std. build of Blender:
11:14:78
Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 with an SSE3 optimized build of Blender:
11:09:98
The difference between the Windows 32bit and the Ubuntu 64bit is quite substantial. On this test I picked up a 17.9% decrease in render time. W00t! The difference between the 64bit optimized and std. build leave a bit more to the imagination with only a 1.47% decrease in render time.
Umm . . . that’s all.
-Karl