CompuServe Messages

I'd be glad to argue that a bare-bones, GUI-less render engine on the PC makes more sense than a WinNT version. 1. Speed. 2. You don't need a GUI on a "render farm" machine. 3. 16 megs of "wasted" RAM on a WinNT machine. 4. You've already got an investment in Intel hardware, why not use it? Even if a render farm machine is *less* powerful than your primary machine, wouldn't you rather render an animation faster *overall* by dividing it among two or three machines, than only using one? 5. You'd need to port any necessary IPAS routines to other platforms. The more dependent your users are on plug-ins, the more intense the need to port them, too. Now, if they simply made 3DS.EXE run safely as a standalone render engine under Win32s/WinNT, then you could have a choice. But don't deny 32-bit DOS's speed if you don't have to.