[Irinikus]

This is an initial look at this machine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w2oG9GP1DI

[computron]

You do not turn on the multithread while blender rendering.... try using 4 or 8 thread.... it may be far faster

Eve

[Irinikus]

Hi Eve,

Thanks very much!

I set it to render four threads and now it's making full use of both CPU's!

---

I've just made another video, showing it rendering with four threads, and you do get pretty close to double the performance!

[Irinikus]

Here's the rendering process carried out with four threads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6pgEcvFUYg

[swarmik]

SGI 320 is an extremely underrated machine. I believe that dual PIII on ~1GHz will kick ass any Octane2 configuration from the same era in the Blender rendering test.

Although the Cobalt graphics chip is viewed as a souped-up O2, it is in fact much more powerful. I've created a benchmark that allows me to compare old professional graphics chips under different scenarios. These are pixel fill rate values I got from Cobalt (mine has only a single Pentium II ~400MHz):

Smooth shaded polys = 185 Mpixels/s
Hi-res textured polys = 154 Mpixels/s
Hi-res textured + alpha-blended polys = 146 Mpixes/s
Dual hi-res textured polys = 77 Mpixels/s

Just to compare with my Octane2 with 1x400MHz R12000 and VPro V6 (32MB)... this machine is one year newer (early-1999 x early-2000):

Smooth shaded polys = 296 Mpixels/s
Hi-res textured polys = 200 Mpixels/s
Hi-res textured + alpha-blended polys = 200 Mpixes/s
Dual hi-res textured polys = 100 Mpixels/s

... not a big difference if you take the price into account.

--

Btw is there anyone with Octane2 VPro V8 / V10 / V12 who can run the benchmark on his/her machine? I see that the memory speed of V6 is not good and I expect something like halved memory bus in comparison with V8... Unfortunately, I'm not able to find SGI technical reports for these machines and it seems that the Internet doesn't have an answer for this.

[mrthinlysliced]

Hey Swarmik,

Fire me a link to that benchmark and I'll give it a run -> I've got a dual 600 + V12 Octane2.

If it needs compiling, let me know where I can find the dependencies too .-)

Mr TS.

[swarmik]

mrthinlysliced: There is a download link and explanation: http://swarm.cz/gpubench/

The dynamic result page is still not ready, but 80% of results are online in this form: http://swarm.cz/gpubench/_GPUbench-results.htm
(+ still need to add multiple systems from Intergraph I already have measured...)

- unpack the archive
- use chmod +x on _All-Tests-f640high.sh and gpubench
- run ./_All-Tests-f640high.sh
- send gpubench_output-f640high.csv and gpubench.log to me
- make a file containing "hinv -v" and tell me what color depth was used

Your GPU is probably too powerful and we will hit VSync somewhere (unfortunately, I don't know how to disable it on SGI systems). We will see what will happen. I can make a more demanding test set so we can get less than 5 fps where no VSync is used...

Thanks