indigo and Quadro graphic card?

General questions about Indigo, the scene format, rendering etc...
User avatar
Borgleader
Posts: 2149
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2008 10:48 am

Post by Borgleader » Sat Jun 28, 2008 6:24 am

zsouthboy wrote:Still a bad idea.

Just buy some RAM, it's cheap!
Yup...you can get away with 4Gb for less than 150$ CAD/US

Robotbeat
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Jun 27, 2008 4:48 pm

Post by Robotbeat » Sat Jun 28, 2008 8:08 am

What about 8 gigs? 16? 4 gig ram modules are ridiculously expensive, whereas a 16-gig flash drive is reasonable, still. I don't know how much ram is needed for various scenes, since I've pretty much just discovered indigo. I prefer things without triangles (triangles tend to use sooo much memory!)... procedural generation is just so much more graceful!

Here's something made just with iso-surfaces (i.e. a poly count of zero... okay, one if you count the infinite plane) in pov-ray 3.6 a while back:
Image

http://robotbeat.deviantart.com/art/Bre ... s-15910267

Does indigo support iso surfaces?

User avatar
zsouthboy
Posts: 1395
Joined: Fri Oct 13, 2006 5:12 am

Post by zsouthboy » Sat Jun 28, 2008 8:28 am

There's a reason flash is cheap and RAM is not (as cheap).

RAM = ns
flash = ms

Additionally, flash cells physically wear out after being written a set number of times - fine for long term data storage, not so much for short term.

Indigo doesn't support iso surfaces or nurbs or anything but tris, no.

Robotbeat
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Jun 27, 2008 4:48 pm

Post by Robotbeat » Sat Jun 28, 2008 8:45 am

triangles only? Really? I am sad. Well, I guess I'll take my pitch somewhere else...

...Ha! I saw something about a sphere in the manual!

Anyways.

Yeah.

But if you're working with something that just won't fit in 4gb of ram, you'd probably have to upgrade to a server-grade motherboard (with many slots in it) versus just putting the swap--temporarily!--on the flash device. Or, just use Windows Readyboost:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... boost.mspx

I think you can have more than one swap, too, so you could have as much swap space as you wanted. And you'd still have at least ten times faster random read performance than you would with a hard-drive.

Obviously it's not an ideal solution, but if you must have more memory somehow, it's better than putting it on disk--although you're right: disk is safer, but modern flash cells won't wear out that quickly. Here's an article about it:
http://www.dansdata.com/flashswap.htm

Robotbeat
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Jun 27, 2008 4:48 pm

Post by Robotbeat » Sat Jun 28, 2008 9:00 am

But you can't actually do that in XP. You have to connect a CF card to a PATA adapter for it to work, since USB is initialized late in boot-up. That will work.

The USB way also works in Vista, though.

They might work in linux, too, even if you might have to replace the usb pen drive every year or two of constant use. You'd probably be fine for many years if you got a quality manufactured device with plenty of spare blocks to remap to.

User avatar
CTZn
Posts: 7240
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 4:34 pm
Location: Paris, France

Post by CTZn » Sat Jun 28, 2008 10:45 am

Actually buying ram is not always cheap:

1- sdram 333 gets hard to find in stores, actually I couldn't.

2- resellers want me to get the computer wrapped around the new-style ram. Heh ! That's not what I call "cheap"...
obsolete asset

Post Reply
21 posts

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 53 guests