Suppose the money is no object and I can have a super-duper configured machine that will cost around US $ 10.000:
Latest fast dual processor motherboard
Latest Xeon 6/8 core processors
Phi co-processor
24 GB Raid 5 configured drives.
Relatively modest Video Card wutb 1 -2 Gb Video RAM
64 Gb or RAM
Win 64 bit
How fast this machine would be and is it worth all the money, or I would be just as happy with aging MacPro 2014?
Dream Machine for DOM
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Carsten
- Posts: 2668
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2014 9:11 pm
- Location: Germany
Re: Dream Machine for DOM
The more cores/HT, the better. Current machines are usually more expensive than previous generation machines. Typically, for the same money, you get more fps with buying two previous generation machines against one current generation machine. Currently, E5-2670 CPUs (v1/2.6GHz/8core) are dead-cheap on ebay.
You should get near/above 24fps realtime encoding with a dual E5-2670 (v1, 8coreHT) machine. DOM currently has some single threaded code in pre/postprocessing. Assuming you could get into the +50fps J2K encoding range, these parts of the conversion will become your bottleneck. The same would apply for a GPU aided J2K conversion.
Afaik, Carl is working on some of these issues.
Until then, a 'cost-sensitive best performer' would be a combo of an over-clocked 4core i7 (e.g. 4790k) with SSDs for Master-DOM, + networked dual CPU 2670 encode server(s). You could get this for not much more than 1000-1200US$.
I have never seen big improvements by using RAID or SSD, but I am using compressed source footage most of the time.
SSD will be very useful when converting from image series. But then you need very large SSDs.
I recommend looking at dual CPU 6core/8core workstations like HP Z600/Z620 (or similar products from Fujitsu-Siemens, Dell, Lenovo). You can get them pretty cheap on ebay, and they are of great build-quality, on par with a Mac Pro.
From my tests, you don't need more than 16-20Gbytes of RAM for DOM. Doing 4k on a Dual-CPU 8core machine maybe. I'm doing +32threads on a 12GB machine in 2k without issues.
- Carsten
You should get near/above 24fps realtime encoding with a dual E5-2670 (v1, 8coreHT) machine. DOM currently has some single threaded code in pre/postprocessing. Assuming you could get into the +50fps J2K encoding range, these parts of the conversion will become your bottleneck. The same would apply for a GPU aided J2K conversion.
Afaik, Carl is working on some of these issues.
Until then, a 'cost-sensitive best performer' would be a combo of an over-clocked 4core i7 (e.g. 4790k) with SSDs for Master-DOM, + networked dual CPU 2670 encode server(s). You could get this for not much more than 1000-1200US$.
I have never seen big improvements by using RAID or SSD, but I am using compressed source footage most of the time.
SSD will be very useful when converting from image series. But then you need very large SSDs.
I recommend looking at dual CPU 6core/8core workstations like HP Z600/Z620 (or similar products from Fujitsu-Siemens, Dell, Lenovo). You can get them pretty cheap on ebay, and they are of great build-quality, on par with a Mac Pro.
From my tests, you don't need more than 16-20Gbytes of RAM for DOM. Doing 4k on a Dual-CPU 8core machine maybe. I'm doing +32threads on a 12GB machine in 2k without issues.
- Carsten