Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U

Rendering Benchmarks

Although one would probably not purchase a $20,000 server for the explicit task of rendering, we thought to include our standard Mental Ray and Shake benchmarks in this review to demonstrate the scalability of all four processors in the system. Similarly, we have looked at how these benchmarks perform on other systems in the past, so we can get a real clear view of the power of our V40z in relation to those systems.

Mental Ray 3.3.3

Just to give a bit of PC trivia, MentalRay was actually first developed on Sun machines during its early stages, and it's interesting to see that we have come full circle to testing Mental Ray on an x86_64 machine designed by Sun. We are running the 32-bit binaries provided by Alias Wavefront. You may be interested to see how some single CPU setups perform on the same test render here. Once again, we are running the same Maya benchmark file found in our other reviews. We ran Mental Ray via Maya using the command below:

# maya_render_with_mr -file Benchmark_Mental.mb

Clearly, something does not seem right here as we do not see the benchmark utilizing all four processors. We were able to trace this flaw down to the software itself and not the server, but we thought it was worth mentioning in the benchmarks section.

Shake 3.5c

Apple develops a great digital effects package called Shake. We took the opportunity to run a newer benchmark script by Lindsay Adams, which you can download here. The benchmark script renders 10 frames under various effects using one or multiple CPUs. We sum the render times and display them below. The times recorded are the averages of three runs.

The command run for this benchmark is:

# shake -exec hardware_test_v01.shk -vv