#Warp Engine with Flyer
10 messages in this thread
Dear Chuck, I'm wondering if you have any opinions about the Warp Engines and
the use of one in an A4000 running the Flyer and Toaster4000 cards? Does this
kind of accelerator cause any problems, or is speed what you need?
James MacAllister, EFP Services, Boston
Our dealership (Slipped Disk) has installed several flyers with Warps with no
problems other than 'normal' flyer problems. If you have any specific
questions pls E'Mail
Jim:
1. I have been using the Flyer with the WE since Day One. It's never gave me
any problems.
2. You don't need the speed incress to work with the Flyer, but if you plane to
work in LightWave it's a must!
Brad Hayes
Hayes Visual Communication
Brad,
I've been thinking about getting a Warp Engine. Did you buy additional memory
for it?
I have a 4000 with 18megs. I was planning on buying the WE to make the system
render faster and in some cases help it with scenes that required more memory
to render at all.
I've been using Hollywood Xfects and some of the larger scenes will not render
on my system because of memory. HFX used both Lightwave and TPaint to go to the
SCSI drives. Once LW4.0 comes out, they plain on droping the TPaint use.
Fred
Fred,
The first step in installing the Warp Engine, usually entails taking the
motherboard resident RAM off the A4000 and installing it in the WE's four
slots. With direct acces to the RAM, the system speeds up right away.
Since the WE can mix RAM simm sizes, you can upgrade the RAM from that point a
chip at a time.
Hank
Videology, Inc Where you always get P.O.M.P. and
Service under all circumstances
Hank,
I understand about the speed up. We've talked about this before. My reason for
asking was to find out if someone using the WE for Lightwave actually added
more memory and found that it gave him an improvement.
I think after I get back from the conference in September, I'm going to go for
the WE. Hopefully, I'll make some money from it (the conference) to be able to
afford it.
Fred
Fred:
It's not like, The more memory, the faster you go, it's just, the more
memory… The more memory!
Brad Hayes
Hayes Visual Communication
Fred:
I did not buy any additional memory for it. I just took what was on the
mother board off and stuck it on the WE. This is actualy what gives the WE its
speed. When I first installed it I was not that impressed, untill I moved the
memory, then WEeeeee… I would suggest 60ns Simms. I did have a small problem
mixing three 60ns and one 70ns on the board. I eventualy left the 70 down on
the Motherboard. If I play back a long Toaster anim (pre-Flyer) you can see
where it slows as it gets to that part of memory. Other than that it has been a
very stable and valuble part of my machine. The people at MacroSystems are
great, very helpfull with any problems.
Before you buy one Find out exactly what the upgrade policy is when they
release thier 060 version. I know they are designing it now. Hopfully it will
be ready as soon as motorola officaly releases the chips.
Brad Hayes
Hayes Visual Communication
We really are restricted in discussing products from other vendors, the most I
can tell you is that I am aware of a number of end users who are successfully
using the Warp Engine. TP, LW, and the CG would be the primary beneficiaries
of any speedup in your system.
Chuck.
I've had a WarpEngine with 16M of RAM installed since before the flyer. It's
been great (knock on wood). The extra SCSI port is handy, too. The CD ROM
drive is connected to the Warp's SCSI chain, so I avoided that unhappy mess
where 4.04 (?) caused SCSI access over the Flyer SCSI chain to become hideously
slow. My system's total RAM 34M which has been fine for what I've done to
date. If I ever challenge the learning curve on Lightwave and start doing cool
3D things, then more memory may be in order.