LOSTCIRCUITS

Phoenix

Aside from CAD renderings, CGI graphics and animations are the largest field of application for high-end professional graphics cards. For example, the A substantial amount of animations and frames in "The Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong" was rendered using AliasWavefront's Maya. (check out these examples)

For the purpose of this review, we are using a much more primitive simulation, namely a sequence of a 200 frames animation of a stick that is thrown and catches fire in mid-air. Essentially the entire rendering is done on the GPU level. For an apple to apple comparison with the older cards, we used Maya 4.5 Personal Learning Edition, under which the entire sequence was rendered in 120 seconds. Upgrading to Maya 7.0 PLE reduced this time to about 50 seconds even though the PLE does not support multiple threads and effectively only runs on a single CPU core and a single GPU.

Screenshot from the flipbook playback of the animation.

Render time in seconds, lower is better. All render passes except for those marked with ** were run under Maya 4.5 PLE, the ** results were achieved with Maya 7.0. There may be a minor performance hit under SLI which is not overly surprising in view of some overhead incurred with SLI enabled but not used.

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