so I have this job with an attorney to do animations for legal purposes, and he wants to make into a business because of the numerous requests for similar work ( in a huge compliment, the loosing attorney on the same case requested information about me)
so he wants to take out a loan to buy me equipment and software, at first he wanted to get two macbook pros, but i told him desktops can be more powerful for cheaper and anyways he said after the loan goes through hes giving me a 4000-5000 budget for a computer ( which is awsome…) and im looking at a mac pro and I need to know about graphics cards
-does a better graphics card just make things look better, or does it make things run faster?
-is NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI), which is the standard grfx card for mac pros acceptable, or should i sacrifice some memory for a better graphics card??
and also the most important question i can ask myself when buying a computer for a job, will that graphics card play gears of war well?? ( kidding… please dont answer that so i dont get tempted)
im very excited about this :), mostly because since I work from home, i dont have to put on pants for work, and I think i speak for everyone when i say thats what’s most important
and also whats the difference between 8gb(4x2gb) memory, and 8gb(8x1gb) memory, and why is the difference 400$
A little bit of both… more Pixel Lights, bigger texture resolutions that can sustain a higher framerate. Any modern card coming out now (besides the integrated Intel 950) will be able to display all of Unity’s shader goodies like normal maps and refraction. Having a really kickass GFX card only makes things look good on your machine though… your end users will have GFX cards that run the gamut so I’ve always believed that having a mid-range card in your work machine means that you’ll always curb yourself from going overboard and creating things that don’t play well for anyone else. Unity 2.0 will have a neat feature to emulate different GFX cards so I guess that point becomes moot.
2GB sticks are just more expensive to manufacture than 1GB sticks. How many memory slots do new Macs have anyway?!? Last time I had a Mac Tower (G3) they had only 2 slots. I’m out of the loop on this
My G5 has 8 slots; I think Mac Pros are the same. In any case, the standard refrain about memory is: don’t buy it from Apple, buy it somewhere else and save big. Although Mac Pro memory is just plain expensive anyway. I’d say get the best graphics card; that way you can properly test all configs. In order to keep slower graphics cards in mind, I just try to keep the minimum framerate higher than it needs to be for my machine, and of course the quality settings also cater to lesser hardware.
Yeah, true, with a 4-5k budget just get the top of the line… or just under top of the line and buy some software with the leftover. I don’t know what you’re using now, but 2 apps, Maya and PhotoShop (and of course Unity), handle 99% of what I do regarding game dev.
@Eric - 8 slots for RAM? What is the memory limit right now for OSX, 16 GB… or is that for Leopard? Crazy, I’ve been hooked on laptops for the last 5 years so I’m still stuck with only 2 memory slots.
software has its own budget, and I already have photoshop, so ill be getting zbrush and maya
i dont think ive ever even used a computer with more than 1 gb of memory, every computer ive ever owned has been refurbished
this will be quite a change for me… no more screaming at my computer " JUST GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
i wound up doing an animation of a back surgery, it was the hardest thing ive ever done
thankfully i mostly do reenactments like recreating a car crash the way ( we say…) it happened
was your virtual medical procedure interactive?? because im trying to think of ways to add some interactivity for the presentation besides pausing in between surgical steps
Heh, you’re in for a rude surprise. It may seem like that at first, but one of the rules of computers is that as soon as you get a really fast computer, you just start doing stuff that makes you wish it was faster. (In a similar fashion, as soon as you get a huge hard drive and say, “Ha! I’ll never fill this up,” you just find more stuff to put on it.)
As for the OS X memory limit, I’m not entirely sure, although in Tiger each app can “only” access 4GB I believe, although you can have more than that available for the whole system. A true 64 bit operating system like Leopard would have a limit of 16 exabytes, but 2 exabyte sticks cost about 50 trillion dollars. (Well, if they existed they probably would.)
It was a “click the object to perform the next step” type thing. I cant say too much specifically, as its hopefully going to pull some funding for other procedures.
The hardest thing for me was figuring out how to manage the file, as it had 6 animations including a dozen or so objects in it. I saved the whole thing as one file and called each step via script, and some items were intended to be invisible until another was clicked. For some reason, when I deactivated a renderer in Unity, it broke all the animations, So I ended up exporting each step individually, and that worked. One step was particularly buggy so I got round that by instantiating the right model with an animation on it. It was a really good learning curve as I know how I’d cut the production time doing the same in the future. Sometimes you’ve got to just back yourself, and give it a go. Client was stoked, I was stoked, Unity rocks and now Im working for people all over the world…Cool huh? Thanks Otee.
I would say memory. Beyond the basic video cards (anything above the GMA), I don’t think anything will help you much in animation. Modeling, perhaps. Game dev, perhaps. I don’t see how it will affect animation, though.
I agree with this. Get the 30" and then configure the Mac Pro to fit. I have a 30" and its more useful than the top of the line card and the 3Ghz processors. Most of the time I’m only using about 20% of my processors any way. Ram is something you will want to stock up on as well, I had 1GB and it just didn’t hack it I upgraded to 5GB and it runs really nice right now.
I also have the X1900XT, my first one overheated on me and burned out (a common occurrence at least for the cards from when I bought the Mac Pro). I had it replaced under apple care (also a must have) and my new card doesn’t work in Windows. So I leave that choice up to you.
Worked fine with my original GPU, the replaced one works for normal stuff but crashes windows in graphics intensive games. It works fine with graphics intensive games in OS X though. So I don’t know what it would be.
(I did all the usual windows stuff, format drive, reinstall system, install boot camp drivers, and it still didn’t work with intensive games)
please dont answer that so i dont get tempted)