On your marks! Get set! Render!
I had the day off work today, so having nothing better to do, I decided to race raz0r (PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz, OS X 10.4.1) and media (Pentium III 933mhz, Ubuntu linux (Hoary)) in rendering with Blender.
raz0r, rendering frame #15 from Magnets: The Movie, required 313MB RAM, and took 2:30 mins to render the frame at 400×300.
media required 380MB RAM, and took 3:40 mins to render the same frame at the same size.
In the words of Stormy Waters, “Smoked that bitch!”. I was expecting the outcome to be along those lines, but I’m not sure why linux requires almost 70MB more RAM to render the same frame.
The output pictures from both were identical, obviously.
Wait, so you’re trying to say that the pc with more GHz rendered the movie faster?
Groundbreaking, indeed!
Yes, the Mac with the faster processor rendered faster. However, the interesting part was that the PC with the slower processor required more RAM.
Anyway, the purpose of the experiment was to decide whether it would be worth it to split rendering across both machines so that it takes less time.