hello all
I have a little question about blender:
blender makes the fastest rendering on Linux, mac or windows ?
stability: more stable on mac, windows or linux?
sorry for my bad english 
ā¦ you know how this goes, these threads usually descend into fanboyism.
I havenāt used it on a mac but have used it on xp, vista and ubuntu linux a lot.
Iāve found it pretty stable on both platforms, even when using āunstableā SVN versions built from source
Open gl performance has been twice as fast for me on linux. ( using nvidia non-free drivers) I tried a variety of drivers on windows to make sure the bad Open gl wasnāt related to that, but even with the very latest drivers the difference in FPS was marginal and in some cases slightlyworse (than the older windows drivers)ā¦
Iāve worked on some pretty large environment scenes and Iāve really felt that difference i performance between the OSs
I ran some benchmarks a while back on two different computers, both dual booting windows and linux
NB I only have 32 bit windows and I only use 64bit ubuntu, so itās not a completely fair test, but I was only interested in what I had to hand.
The benchmarks imply that rendering is faster on linux, I just know itās slow on both and canāt really say iāve noticed a big difference.
If itās important I suggest you test that for yourself.
Sorry I donāt own a mac and probably never will so canāt help there
On Mac since there are some broken opengl drivers id doesenāt run at full speed, but I got some pretty good with a 2.4 ghz, 2 gb ram, nVidia 8600.
Understanding poor English is the least of our worries. But please make these posts in the correct forums. This belongs under a Support forum.
I get much better rendertimes in Linux, but Iāve noticed that in real-time 3D display it starts to lag at a lower poly count than it does in Windows.
All in all though I prefer using Blender in Linux.
Its not that much abou render time in my experience but about a huge improvement in memory usage, you can get to 20 million polys on a computer in linux and get only 6 million on the same computer in windows
I found a very large performance boost when I tried blender on Ubuntu both with the linux version and windows version running on WINE.
TO BRIAN H:
āUnderstanding poor English is the least of our worriesā. Youāre also nice that a prison door!
Otherwise thank you all for your information.
Ok, if you really want my opinion on the matter, youāre trying to compare apples and oranges. Your render times have absolutely nothing to do with the operating system of which Blender is run on. Itās the hardware that drives your computer. Naturally you will have more hardware options using a Windows or *nix based operating systems, since Apple has more proprietary hardware. With the switch to Intel processors from PowerPC, theyāve opened up a bit to more customization.
Regardless of the system you are running on, you need to make sure that you minimize the number of processes being ran while rendering. I have a 4 node renderfarm running Ububtu Studio, and I ensure that unrelated processes are killed before I begin rendering. Windows systems have long been known to be resource hungry, in that the operating system itself consumes a lot of memory. However, there are plenty of ways to optimize itās performance by shutting off all the gidgets and gadgets that you really donāt need. The same goes for linux systems running memory intensive user interfaces, such as XGL/Compiz.
Personally, aside from my renderfarm, I use Apple computers. My main system is a Dual 2.7GHz PowerMac G5. I love it, simply because Iām more familiar with it.
I also noticed clear performance improvements in Linux (Ubuntu) ā in the order or 17 vs 24 minutes, both official builds running default scheduling priorities.
I have to say this was not the case with the low-latency (rt) kernel. My renders were actually slower back then.
Yeah, I had the same experience. Strangeā¦
In general you could put the increased performance under linux down to better task scheduling, and lower memory overheads. Basically linux seems to make better use of your hardware,.
The other thing (slightly OT) for render performance, itās better to use the command line. This is the case for windows and linux.
I try blender on windows and linux ( debian and fedoara)
Best performance is on linux -debian.
On fedoara is little slow .
AMD 1700 , 512 MB ram, NVIDiA FX5200
Have e nice day !
I guess it has all been saidā¦
You will have to distinguish UI performance and Render performance.
The UI (User Interface) Is drawn using OpenGL. Wether or not OpenGL performance is actually better on Linux or Windows, that depends a lot on how good the driver for each respective system is. It used to be the case that for example ATI cards had worse performance under linux than windows, simply because of really crappy drivers from ATI. Meanwhile the situation has changed and there are some ATI cards which perform better under linux than Windows.
Another thing to consider is (in case of linux) which distro you use. Performance can vary from Distro to Distro. Some distros have more stuff going on in the background by default than others.
Anyways as far as OpenGL is concerned, no clear winner since its different from GPU to GPU.
As far as pure render performance is concerned (e.g. rendering from the command line, without a gui), linux has the upper hand. Better memory management, lower overhead. With linux you can trim off a lot more fat than with windows, and still have it in a very useable state.
Also, compilation optimisations are to be considered as well. If a distro compiles everything for i386 while another one compiles everything for at least i686, you can expect slight increases in render performance. Same with 64bit distros.
There isnāt really any performance gain between 32bit and 64bit. 64bit can simply handle more RAM. However, you can assume that a 64bit distro will have compiled its apps with optimisations for amd64 rather than still carrying i386 compatible bloat with it.
If you really wanna go all out and if your up to it, you could try a distro like Gentoo, where you compile your entire system from scratch, thereby optimising it for your particular CPU. In day to day usage, you might not notice much of a difference, but even just a few seconds less during rendering can really be noticeable when you are rendering a long animation.
I use Blender in Arch Linux and windows, Linux is very fast ā¦
I am using Arch Linux with Kernel 2.6.26 and X11 and and python compiled with flags -march=core2 (gcc 4.3) etc. Blender run very very fast. I can handle complex scenes very very smoth. Blender compiled in machine too
Actually, for many computatively intensive applications there is alot of performance to be gained from 64bit. 32bit cpuās (and 64bit running in 32bit mode) have eight 32bit registers available to them. Of these eight, only five are actually considered as ātrulyā general purpose registers since some are designated to stack, base and program counter. 64bit mode adds another eight registers (totaling sixteen) that are truly general purpose, and having many registers are very advantageous for fast code since itās the fastest place to store and retrieve values. This particularly has a great effect in tight loops where instead of having to push and pop values from (much slower) stack, you can keep them in lightning fast registers. Also, given that all registers are 64bit, they can now hold larger values (or twice the amount of smaller ones) which means that big values that sometimes used up two 32bit registers can now be held in one 64bit register, thus increasing the number of free registers available and also simplifying operations on large values. Iāve seen many benchmarks showing that encoding/decoding, compression/decompression etc algorithms compiled for 64bit has had great performace increases against 32bit builds on the same hardware. I canāt see that 3d rendering would be any difference.
That may be true, but iāve benchmarked 4 computers with different Nvidia cards and am consistently getting twice the performance of openGL on ubuntu on these systemsā¦ (using the drivers provided by Nvidia)
so if you have an nvidia card itās safe to say linux wins on openGL
as far as iāve experienced, blender has always run faster and rendered faster in linux, whereas in windows itās a lot slower.
Well all of them do the job, so its all about what system you want to run, whats best for you