Hardware

Posted in Hardware on October 28, 2016

I'm sorry, I just have to share this =)

• No hardware function keys
• No hardware ESC
• No MagSafe
• No USB-A ports
• No HDMI port
• No SD-Card slot
• No DisplayPort
• Dongleware trap (with a bunch of adapters)
• 16 gigs RAM cap
• Price to die for. Literally

Oh, Apple, you never fail to amuse!

Posted in Hardware on June 27, 2016

Out of curiosity decided to quickly compare the cost and rendering performance of several CUDA-capable GPUs.

Scores taken from the official OctaneBench results database. Prices - from local online merchants in my area (TAX, VAT included) so your mileage may vary. I used my GTX 970 results as reference. The fact that it's one of the most popular enthusiast-grade GPUs on the market also helps.

I didn't account for the power consumption because electricity rates vary a lot from area to area so if you're planning to run your render farm 24/7 (which is not recommended) you can look into it yourself.

(Used) NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti is a clear winner here. So if you're thinking about building a render farm to use with Octane or Redshift, check it out, it's a bargain.

As soon as GTX 1080 CUDA-compute/rendering results become available I will add them to the chart. Don't expect a miracle though. Preliminary benchmark results from various forums including Redshift and Lexmark show that GTX 1080 is pretty much just a tad faster than 980 Ti and Titan, and in some heavy scenes it can actually be slower than the two! Hope it's just a driver problem and we'll see at least 20-25% improvement over the previous flagship models as promised by NVIDIA.

Otherwise it will be a grave disappointment.