Settling a dispute, Pixar's PC Specs.

[Akubane]

Alright, this is kinda dumb but i don't care. Need some help because I can't find any up to date info anywhere.

I was chatting with a buddy about mac vs windows and SOMEHOW we ended up arguing about how much RAM pixar needs to render their films like wall-e.

He's saying they're using and need to use 32-64GB of ram to render that.

I think he's bloody retarded.******

He think's im clueless.



Anyone have a link to how much RAM pixar uses on their rendering pc's these days?
Or even just some insight on what you think?

Google leaves me feeling empty. I don't really know anythign about rending crazy stuff but needing retarded amounts of ram like that just seems absurd. I'd think it would rely more of the GPU's power?

 

[veg1992]

It'd just have to run AutoCAD/ Maya smoothly... so I'm thinking like maybe 4-8gb RAM somewhere there?

Maybe a bit of Sony Vegas?

 

[Kharn]

Locked OSX on any computer on something other than apple hardware is illegal because it breaks apples EULA.

Edit: Removed reference to the OSX issue - in hind sight it was a little heavy handed of me to lock it I should have edited it in the first place.

To answer your question Pixar will have a MASSIVE rendering farm with maxed out clustered computers.

 

[wafflehammer]

yay for unlocking :]. like vern said, 4-8gb seems like enough....but wouldn't this be more focused on the GPU/CPU and not RAM?

 

[veg1992]

yay for unlocking :]. like vern said, 4-8gb seems like enough....but wouldn't this be more focused on the GPU/CPU and not RAM?

Indeed..

They'd need a good FireGL or Quadro card

 

[wafflehammer]

what are those?

 

[veg1992]

what are those?

Those are video cards for workstations, usually 3d modeling needs those types of cards

 

[SirCyber]

Saxon has the correct answer. first of all, you have to determine the length of any given scene, but ususally they will use a rendering "farm" to do the work, it will almost certianly not be done on one pc. however, the renderfarm will most likely utilize computers maxxed for rendering, utilizing anywhere from 4-8 GB of ram and utilizing workstation vid cards, designed for rendering. and I'd also be willing to bet that they use proprietary systems that are not something that most of us cannot get our hands on lol.

*am taking classes for computer animation so have a little knowledge in the field*

 

[gurusan]

yeah you have render farms, you can't do all that work on a single PC.

For processing large amnts of data you never do that.....at school we have a CFD machine that's comprised of 25 dualcore Xeon rackmount servers.

 

[ricanflow]

Im pretty sure they dont even use quadro cards, more likely they use tesla arrays.


NVIDIA Tesla 1U Computing System - scalable many core supercomputing for data centers