Robin Mordasiewicz wrote:
<disclaimer> No scientific data follows </disclaimer>
In our shop we are rending animation. We have dual opterons. We render with the 64 bit version of mental ray. We did side by side tests and found that the larger and more complex the task is the more savings there were, but when rendering a bunch of small simple files the savings were not noticeable.
On the very complex shots we cut render times by almost half. Most of our jobs are not very complex so the ratio evens out at about roughly a 10-20 percent gain. But the thing is that when the time comes to do something very complex comes it can be finished in say three days as opposed to five days.
Wow, that's useful information for me since some of these machines are ultimately going to be put to use doing video media encoding of D1 and HD video. I guess I'll have to run some tests too and see if we notice similar speedups for media encoding.
Cheers,