I’m going to have to disagree on the point about the biggest difference-maker.
Nuke is still primarily I/O bound in all situations, and while having upwards
of 24 GB of RAM is nice, it is by no means a requirement. I would prefer a
machine with blazing storage and 16 GB of RAM to one with 48 GB connected to
poorly-configured network storage any day. Now, 24 GB is so cheap these days
that you may as well go there (especially with the new quad-channel
configuration of the LGA2011 socket), but keep in mind that I/O is going to be
your main bottleneck, and build or plan accordingly.
GPU acceleration is cool, but it is still in its infancy, largely untested,
and... well, fragile. By the time Nuke is (really) ready to take advantage of
it, any card you buy today will be a relic, so don’t overthink that part of it
right out of the gate... it’s easy to upgrade. Focus on the fundamentals to
start with.
Regarding CPUs, I would be generally inclined to spring for more cores vs.
higher clock speeds, and since it sounds like you may end up doing a fair bit
of 3D rendering, the higher core counts will really pay dividends there. It is
worth noting that, beyond a certain point, throwing more cores at Nuke can
actually end up hurting your performance more than helping it.
There have been some fairly recent complaints resurfacing about performance
hits when using large numbers of (virtual?) cores, and while I haven’t
encountered these myself, you may want to do a quick search of the forum/list
archives to see what people had to say. Worst-case scenario is probably that
you would have to prevent Nuke from using your virtual cores. Either way, the
Sandy Bridge-E and (I assume) Ivy Bridge CPUs are absolute screamers, so you
won’t be disappointed.
-Nathan
From: Jose Fernandez de Castro
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 10:13 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Nuke-users] Cores, Ghz, and GPU for Nuke 7
In my opinion the single biggest thing that makes a difference in Nuke is RAM.
All of the other upgrades (faster cpu's, fast drives) do make a difference, but
it is usually minimal. With the upcoming release GPU's might start to be a
factor, but it seems like any recent lower end to mid end Quadro should be more
than enough to do the job if you are aiming for workstation class cards.
Get 24 gigs as the absolute minimum in RAM, 48 gigs is better for sure! I
personally haven't seen much difference in performance from using i7 quadcore
processors compared to Xeons (although it obviously depends on what models you
are comparing).
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 9:59 AM, thoma <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on a new workstation and I thought I'd
get some opinions on components that will play nicely with the upcoming release
of Nuke 7.
GPU
I saw the latest demos so a good GPU is in order to take advantage of all the
new gpu accelerated features. What's best for nuke? Cuda? OpenGL? OpenCL? Lots
of memory? Speed?
CPU
I'm deciding between dual 2.5ghz 6 core xeons (12 core total) and dual 3.3ghz
4core (8 cores total). I've seen on other threads here that since many
operations in nuke are single threaded a faster single core performance will
translate to better interactivity. However I've also seen people use the
comparison of (cores x ghz per core) to decide. In this case its a score of 30
for the 12 core and 26.4 for the 8 core. Would a single threaded operation at
2.5ghz really be THAT much slower than at 3.3ghz? Enough to justify 4 fewer
physical cores and 8 virtual?
One thing to note is I want this system to also play nicely with Maya, Vray,
CS6, Zbrush, and Mari.....
Thanks!
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Jose Fernandez de Castro
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