Why is CGI so expensive?

[TechnoWraith]

No matter what kind of computer we try to build the Studio's will always have us beat due to one thing we cannot afford....... renderfarms!

I for one was looking at the Boxx Workstations. RainMaker uses them and absolutely loves them. The one I was looking at had 2 gigs RAM and 2 AMD Opteron processors along with a slew of other hardware, but $3500 is alot for me.

But $3500 isn't much when you consider that high-end top performance gaming rigs can run upwards of $5,000! That's gaming. Not image editing, or graphics rendering.

[creed462]

Don't some of the companies run beowolf clusters?

[O'Neil]

But $3500 isn't much when you consider that high-end top performance gaming rigs can run upwards of $5,000! That's gaming. Not image editing, or graphics rendering.

Well, I was meaning its alot for a home desktop system that will be used for video and 3D. I personally do not know anyone that has paid that much for a home system. I was thinking about getting a Dell, but they charge way too much for something with only 256 or 512 RAM.

[TechnoWraith]

Well, I was meaning its alot for a home desktop system that will be used for video and 3D. I personally do not know anyone that has paid that much for a home system. I was thinking about getting a Dell, but they charge way too much for something with only 256 or 512 RAM.

Dell tends to overprice some of their systems. But the thing with dell, is taht they share the RAM with the graphics. So you're actually getting up to 64 megs LESS then say 256, or 512. That's why i try to max out RAM. But i have a custom built system, not a brand name unit.

[Avatar28]

Dell tends to overprice some of their systems. But the thing with dell, is taht they share the RAM with the graphics. So you're actually getting up to 64 megs LESS then say 256, or 512. That's why i try to max out RAM. But i have a custom built system, not a brand name unit.

You DO realize that that's only on the low end systems with integrated video right? And that ANY integrated video solution does the same thing.

Skydiver, if you guys were being charged over $10k for an equivalent PC you were getting majorly screwed on price.

Technowraith, you act as if gaming is simple, it's not. In fact, I would say that gaming is one of the single most stressful things you can do to your system. It greatly stresses both CPU and graphics nearly to their limits. A couple of years ago, Nvidia showed a demonstration of a scene from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being rendered in realtime on desktop PC GAMING hardware. Granted, I'm sure that the poly counts were greatly reduced (IIRC, the main characters consisted of over one MILLION polys EACH!) but on the smaller screen of a PC I guess you couldn't tell. Whereas pro rendering takes a long time, the rendering done in games has to be done in realtime, preferably at speeds of 30+ times/sec. For instance, the game Far Cry can support over 150,000 polys in one scene and yet modern hardware can render it at well over 100 times/sec. This is probably one of the reasons why the Nvidia Quadro cards (which are based on consumer hardware) are also one of the better 3D rendering cards too.

[smurf]

If you want a good PC your best bet is to build your own (it's not difficult, you just lose access to an overpriced helpline), or use a specialist. You never get value for money from a large firm.

I agree, an equivalent PC shouldn't cost 3x the price of the Mac (sounds like Apple fan-boyism to me ), but it is still likely to be more expensive since the programmes are primarily Mac based - owing to it's long term use in the graphics industry - and most programme ports always lose something in the translation.
I'm not a fan of Macs myself, but that's probably because I don't use them regularly.

[Avatar28]

If you want a good PC your best bet is to build your own (it's not difficult, you just lose access to an overpriced helpline), or use a specialist. You never get value for money from a large firm.

I agree, an equivalent PC shouldn't cost 3x the price of the Mac (sounds like Apple fan-boyism to me ), but it is still likely to be more expensive since the programmes are primarily Mac based - owing to it's long term use in the graphics industry - and most programme ports always lose something in the translation.
I'm not a fan of Macs myself, but that's probably because I don't use them regularly.

Well on the low end, it's hard to be a $399 Dell, honestly. You would be very hard pressed to build and test a system with LEGAL copies of the software for less and Dells are good and quiet and generally tame. On the other hand with a higher end system, you can definitely do better by doing it yourself, especially if you're good at choosing your components and shopping around.

And actually Mac is a tiny player in the workstation market (which is what we're talking about here) with almost all of it now being owned by x86 based systems. Now photshop and stuff like that, yeah, Macs have long been dominant (though even then most of the stuff is equally as fast or faster on a PC generally, now it's just inertia). Pretty soon there won't even be that since Macs are all going to x86 based anyways. That will in many ways be a plus because the software will use the same code and they can spend more time optimizing it.

[smurf]

Well on the low end, it's hard to be a $399 Dell, honestly. You would be very hard pressed to build and test a system with LEGAL copies of the software for less and Dells are good and quiet and generally tame. On the other hand with a higher end system, you can definitely do better by doing it yourself, especially if you're good at choosing your components and shopping around.

And actually Mac is a tiny player in the workstation market (which is what we're talking about here) with almost all of it now being owned by x86 based systems. Now photshop and stuff like that, yeah, Macs have long been dominant (though even then most of the stuff is equally as fast or faster on a PC generally, now it's just inertia). Pretty soon there won't even be that since Macs are all going to x86 based anyways. That will in many ways be a plus because the software will use the same code and they can spend more time optimizing it.

Sure, but I wouldn't try to render anything on a $399 Dell.

Inertia is probably a good way to explain it. I get the feeling we keep getting Macs purely because we've always had Macs. It's not as if they talk to our big box machines any better than a PC would - ie. not at all

Optimizing, optimizing, hmm, sounds familiar. You mean make it better? What, and not leave your customers spending hours determining why a $500,000 piece of software/hardware just went kaput?

[Skydiver]

Skydiver, if you guys were being charged over $10k for an equivalent PC you were getting majorly screwed on price.

lol


a good chunk of that was to simply purchase the Leitch DPS Velocity Q system. which was going to run 10K each, plus software and storage...which is why my old one is sitting on the floor and we switched to the macs

we had the lower end system, but they decided to phase that one out and stopped supporting it

also, to run it, we had to have scsi drives with 10K revs, which are very, very pricy.

all of that was simply going to be way too much to purchase so, despite the grief we've goten from our computer services for daring to have macs in the building we got these and i love them

[TechnoWraith]

You DO realize that that's only on the low end systems with integrated video right? And that ANY integrated video solution does the same thing.

Skydiver, if you guys were being charged over $10k for an equivalent PC you were getting majorly screwed on price.

Technowraith, you act as if gaming is simple, it's not. In fact, I would say that gaming is one of the single most stressful things you can do to your system. It greatly stresses both CPU and graphics nearly to their limits. A couple of years ago, Nvidia showed a demonstration of a scene from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being rendered in realtime on desktop PC GAMING hardware. Granted, I'm sure that the poly counts were greatly reduced (IIRC, the main characters consisted of over one MILLION polys EACH!) but on the smaller screen of a PC I guess you couldn't tell. Whereas pro rendering takes a long time, the rendering done in games has to be done in realtime, preferably at speeds of 30+ times/sec. For instance, the game Far Cry can support over 150,000 polys in one scene and yet modern hardware can render it at well over 100 times/sec. This is probably one of the reasons why the Nvidia Quadro cards (which are based on consumer hardware) are also one of the better 3D rendering cards too.

I never said gaming was easy. I know gaming. One way to break in a rig is to play games on it. Gaming is indeed the most intensive task a computer has to handle.

As for the hardware, yes, the hardware takes a severe beating when it comes to rendering and graphics display. For that reason, when i build my imaging/rendering rig, i'm gonna get two video cards and connect them together. (There's a name for that but i forgot what it was).

[Mio]

...each frame of the city consists of about 8.2 million pixels, broken down into about 15 layers, z depths, mattes, rgbs etc... which means that for each city establishing shot you get, someone somewhere has baby-sat 124,416,000 pixels, which also means the average city shot can take about 4 solid days of artist-watched render time, 24/7.....

Mark Breakspear
Visual Effects Supervisor
Atlantis

I think THAT gives a good idea of why it costs so much.

[thorshammer]

Very, very interesting. I have always wondered that myself. And finally I know.
Although, confused with all the big words.

[Giantevilhead]

Here's something interesting about the future of CGI. Battle Angel Alita, James Cameron's new film, which is going to cost something like $300 million, will have photorealistic CGI and according to James Cameron, will revolutionize computer generated effects, which is something he and Stan Winston did 15 years ago with Terminator 2. Interesting fact about Terminator 2, all the CGI in that movie took up about 900 MB of space.

[TechnoWraith]

Here's something interesting about the future of CGI. Battle Angel Alita, James Cameron's new film, which is going to cost something like $300 million, will have photorealistic CGI and according to James Cameron, will revolutionize computer generated effects, which is something he and Stan Winston did 15 years ago with Terminator 2. Interesting fact about Terminator 2, all the CGI in that movie took up about 900 MB of space.

but back then, they had no where near the sophistication and power that we have now.

[Avatar28]

I never said gaming was easy. I know gaming. One way to break in a rig is to play games on it. Gaming is indeed the most intensive task a computer has to handle.

As for the hardware, yes, the hardware takes a severe beating when it comes to rendering and graphics display. For that reason, when i build my imaging/rendering rig, i'm gonna get two video cards and connect them together. (There's a name for that but i forgot what it was).

Sorry, my bad then. Seemed like you were dismissing it maybe. What you're thinking of is called SLI (at least in Nvidia's version, ATI will have their own and will require their own motherboards, etc; it wouldn't work with an SLI Nvidia board AFAIK).