SGI: Computer Graphics

Good afternoon folks,

As I continue to hunt for my IRIX dream machine, I was wondering if anyone could comment on their experiences using Maya 6.5 under IRIX? In particular I am interested in how usable is modeling performance on an Indigo2 (with either High or Max Impact), vs. O2 vs. Octane? I've looked at the old IRIX Qualification charts and I see that Indigo2 is "unsupported" and O2 is "untested", but I suspect that has not stopped folks from giving it a try.

By way of comparison, my last experience using Maya 6.5 was on an SGI 320 VW under Win2000 with dual 1 GHZ PIII's, and I'm wondering if there was a configuration of an IRIX box that would be somewhat similar in performance?

Any thoughts would me much appreciated!

-Matt

The last Maya-Version (4.5) I ran on an O2 (R5K-200 SC, 256 MB) was no fun at all. At least you want to have an R7000@600 MHz O2 with 1 GB RAM or the R12.000

Or better got Octane2/Fuel/Tezro for that matter. I saw a 600 MHz fuel with V12 ending on ebay for 190 EUR....

compared to pretty much any other 3d proggy for irix maya is fat and sluggish. maybe second to xsi in that regard
in fairness it's mostly the gui parts which for some reason seem to run a crapload of stuff upon loading because the widgets are almost irix standard which aren't slow at all.

what is very fast compared to almost any other contenders are the 3d viewports. maya shines in terms of realtime display; easily keeping things fluid where most other 3d proggies drop to nasty one digit frame rates.

another factor is the renderer. unlike its predecessor raytracer/raycaster the maya default renderer sucks. later versions come with mental ray which is very slow tho so rendering with maya is not ideal. at some point however it was possible to intergrate renderman which was what pretty much anyone did at the time although the latter doesn't support multiple cpus for a single image.

and to wrap it up a quick hint: if you have a machine with multiple cpus you might wanna use maya 5 because there the default license included mental ray for up to 8 cpus. later versions had it cut down to 2

Trevalin wrote: By way of comparison, my last experience using Maya 6.5 was on an SGI 320 VW under Win2000 with dual 1 GHZ PIII's, and I'm wondering if there was a configuration of an IRIX box that would be somewhat similar in performance?

I've only used Maya 6.5 on an 800 MHz v12 Fuel. It felt fine to me on that hardware, but I really only played around with it a little bit for hobby purposes, nothing very heavy duty.

You might find Ian Mapleson's SGI Performance Comparison page to be helpful - http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp.html

Look in the sidebar there for "Maya V6.5 Simple Scene" for a set of benchmarks on various SGI systems.

Maya 6.5 on my dual 600MHz Octane2/v12 runs very nicely indeed...

Thank you all for the input, this is very useful information. To sort of summarize so far:

1) Any sort of R5000 O2 is ruled out
2) Fuel with 800mhz and V12 gets a thumbs up
3) Octane2 with dual 600mhz and V12 also gets a thumbs up

Now that I think about it, I seem to remember in college using Maya 1.0 on an Indigo2 XZ a couple of times, and it was painfully slow to model with much less animate anything, so I think I can rule that out as well. Can anyone comment with personal experiences on any other specific combinations? How about Octane with some of the other graphics options like MXE, or V8/V10? Or Indigo2 with perhaps Max Impact?

For what its worth, I found the qualification charts here ( http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/qu ... _IRIX.html ) but it does leave quite a bit listed as "unsupported" or "untested".

Again, thanks to everyone for your thoughts and suggestions!

-Matt

It's all rather up to how you define 'usable'. I used 5.0 (I think) on an R10k I2 with SI graphics at one point and found it perfectly workable. My current machine has been running 6.5 on a single 300MHz R12k and SE+TMEZZ for a while, and with a V6 and now with dual 300 R12ks with V12. All the combinations work just fine (though the viewports glitch with lines in the grid sometimes disappearing and weird colours in the animation slider; I guess it's not optimized for vpro). Just don't expect performance like a modern machine. Doing any kind of simulation on a desktop sgi is going to let you take long coffee breaks or naps...

Personally I still prefer modelling on the SGI, the UI--particularily on OSX--is suffering from nasty porting artifacts, or at least did when I last checked the PLE. I've been looking for a compatible standalone MR (MRfM asks for a backend from the server of the same minor version and croaks if it doesn't get it) for windows so I could slave the rendering on the hulking i5 for this reason but as yet to no avail.

That's good information, thank you!

I guess it might help if I described my goals a bit more, which will primarily be character and spaceship modeling for a story I am writing, strictly as a personal creative project. So it will mostly be still images, and perhaps some short (10 seconds, give or take) animation clips rendered out at no bigger than 640x480.

From an artistic point of view, I could certainly make do with a more modern system for this project, but I would like the experience of learning how to properly put together my own IRIX machine as well, as all of this is strictly a hobby project.

Which reminds me of another question…is there any other method other than networking for moving files around? I'm sure its not as easy as throwing texture map files on a USB stick and moving them from one machine to another like we might do with macs or pc's, but is there any other method?

Please keep the suggestions and advice coming in, I very much appreciate it!

-Matt

duck wrote: Personally I still prefer modelling on the SGI, the UI--particularily on OSX--is suffering from nasty porting artifacts

likewise, maya on osx always sucked
last one i tried was 2009 i think and it was awful hehe

the other reason why i prefer irix is that many of the things i run are not available for any other os anyway

Trevalin wrote: I guess it might help if I described my goals a bit more, which will primarily be character and spaceship modeling for a story I am writing, strictly as a personal creative project. So it will mostly be still images, and perhaps some short (10 seconds, give or take) animation clips rendered out at no bigger than 640x480.

It all depends on the complexity, and even then you can turn off (or use selective) texturing and shading previews and use tricks like bouding box displays to keep the polycount down when you're modelling. Shouldn't be too big a problem unless you want armies of millions of highly detailed battleships... The things that run slow are really physics simulations and operations on objects with high poly counts or complexity. Rendering always takes a long time but that's "unmanaged" so it's generally not such a big deal.

trevalin wrote: Which reminds me of another question…is there any other method other than networking for moving files around? I'm sure its not as easy as throwing texture map files on a USB stick and moving them from one machine to another like we might do with macs or pc's, but is there any other method?

What else would there be? Magic? I tend to use NFS for file transfers here, my "work" dir on all desktops is mounted from a server in the closet. Mind you, you'll still have to deal with the problem of absolute paths to textures in the scene files if you intend to model on irix and render elsewhere.

I would say that Maya 6.5 runs very nice on my 600MHz V12 Fuel. My Octane 2 with a single 400MHz CPU and a Vpro 10 is also running Maya very nicely indeed. If you are running in wireframe mode, both machines can handle pretty high polycount models and still be quite responsive. Noticeably faster than any VW320 I have tested so far and certainly much faster than my own VW320 with a single 500MHz CPU. (wich really needs more RAM and a second CPU)

Of course, none of them can handle the millions upon millions of polygons every frame any modern GPU can do these days with ease. But where is the fun in that?

I haven't bothered to try Maya 6.5 on my Old Indigo 2 with extreme graphics yet, but it does handle Softimage very nicely.

sgtprobe wrote: I haven't bothered to try Maya 6.5 on my Old Indigo 2 with extreme graphics yet, but it does handle Softimage very nicely.

assuming you're talking about the classic softimage that does run fine with extreme gfx. maya on the other hand is very fat and sluggish in comparison as mentioned already; the gui in particular.
i wouldn't recommend maya on anything other except octanes and above. well maybe r12k o2, too.

I am not an expert on software, but I have had to yank out a power cord as my I2 power supply smoked. I have found Maya 6.5 runs fine on an Octane2 2x400, V10 and I have spare parts that were cheap and available. As a novice I don't get 10 hours straight to learn something so the machines get turned on and off for days on end and that hammers the PSU.

I can tell you from personal experience that Maya on an O2 R5K machine really sucks. That's what I learned Maya on, and it was very sluggish.
I have an Octane2 with Dual 600 CPU and V12 graphics. Maya works great on that machine - for an SGI. It's dog slow compared to what I have at work (NVIDIA K5000, 6x 3.33GHZ CPU, 48GB RAM), but that's to be expected.
I have an SE card as well as a single 300, and dual 400 CPU's that I've tried on the same machine. There is a marked improvement over the SE card compared with the V12. Massive difference. The processors make a difference when calculating complex modeling operations and rendering - as well as overall performance. Dual doesn't really help over single for non-rendering tasks.
Hope that helps!

I noticed that the audio coupling capacitors in the Indigo2 like to burn up. I don't much care for the smell of tantalum pentoxide in the morning.

foetz wrote:

sgtprobe wrote: I haven't bothered to try Maya 6.5 on my Old Indigo 2 with extreme graphics yet, but it does handle Softimage very nicely.

assuming you're talking about the classic softimage that does run fine with extreme gfx. maya on the other hand is very fat and sluggish in comparison as mentioned already; the gui in particular.
i wouldn't recommend maya on anything other except octanes and above. well maybe r12k o2, too.

Yeah, SI 3.9 I think it is, so it runs very well on that old machine. Anyway, there is a reason why I haven't bothered to install Maya on it, just as you say. But now I might install it just to see how bad it actually is. Have you or anyone else tried this before?

I'm new to SGI, just bought an Octane 2 dual 300mhz. I like it and find it interesting to play around with. I just recently got Maya 6.5 installed. My regular 3d machine is a dual/quad Mac Pro which I laid out for heavy graphics use. It's a fast machine, no doubt, but the sgi isn't difficult to work on at all. It's hard to compare 2 300mhz processors to 8 xeon cores running at 3.2ghz but the sgi holds its own. I like to see how a modern MIPS processor with technology that was kept up with would compare to Intel's fast processors. I guess we'll never see that. I started "rendering" as my wife calls it in '92 on a 485DX2-50 so I vividly remember setting up a scene and letting it render overnight. I did a lot of cgi static images back then, thankfully. I couldn't image rendering out a long animation on that 486.

Have you ever seen this:

http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/perfcomp.html

There's a bunch of speed tests done using Maya on a bunch of sgi's and some new machines as well.

Vlad

You can add the Onyx R12K 400 and R14K 500's IR2,IR3 etc to the list as well. Maya 5-6.5 performs very well on these machines. I still actively use mine for modeling low polygon characters and or objects before taking them over to a PC running ZBrush etc

sgtprobe wrote: Have you or anyone else tried this before?

no and i'm not keen on it either
on an indigo2 you have to run the previous generation stuff. except for the viewports a poweranimator for example will probably beat maya on an octane in terms of workflow and your si 3.9 will for sure. in return these things will fly on an octane of course

6.5 runs just fine on dual 360 Octane with EMXI. Fine until you need to do physical simulations.