The low down on Max Vista and Vray? Any advice.

[DP]

We're updating our workstations and one of the render nodes...what i'm wondering is if it's a good time to leap onto Vista? And wether to jump to 64 bit while we're at it to take advantage of the higher ram roof.

The workstations only need to run max, and surf and talk to the windows 2003 domain...thats it...the render node just needs to render with vray on backburner.

As we regularly tear our hair out hitting the roof ram on xp, is it worth jumping two feet into vista 64 bit with max 9?

We have a couple of render nodes that aren't 64 bit capable, and a few spare machines that are also not, but assuming we're not rendering animations that often and just stills, is there a difference between a render on 32 and 64 bit in terms of look and colour?

Also, are the bugs with max 9 sp2 or does this work ok with vista 64?

Cheers

Rob

[mike_kennedy]

No Experience with Vista all all, but We are having great success with XP 64.
The only issues to look out for is making sure you have driver support for your machines and understand when moving to 64 Bit max that you will lose Quicktime support, that's the only ones that have hit us. Driver we now have for everything for the most part and on the Quick time issue everyone using 64 bit will have the same problem....
Cheers
Mike K
(I have no opinion on Vista other than from what I hear it uses up a lot of RAM.....)

[DaForce]

Dont bother with vista, it offers nothing over xp 64bit for what you guys will use it for.. workstations and render nodes.

About the memory usage, yes it uses more memory, but when a memory intensive program wants more vista gives it back.

[RErender]

I'm running Vista 64 on my home workstation, I've haven't had any problems running max or vray.

I agree though not much reason to use it except it's nice to look at and the DX10 support, not very compelling reasons for the foreseeable future.

[DaForce]

agreed.

The only reason I will consider it is if DX10 never properly makes it to XP and then Crysis comes out, given most new games are going to start learning towards dx10 only.. or atleast to get all the super pretty stuff.

My GF has vista on her laptop and its fine for the most part.. until it does the odd weird thing.. but you get that occasionaly in XP as well i guess.

[mcnamex]

vista x64 ultimate with q6600 gtx8800, max 2008 so far so good, had few odd crazy glitches and lots of hair strumming beforehand - depends how motivated you will be on troubleshooting their vista box and max and other packages

all the best

[DP]

can we just use business, or do we have to use ultimate?

what hair pulling have you had?

[VISUAL_BYTES]

I use xp32 and vista32 machines, When vray crashes in one OS it crashes on the other too, so there is no specific RAM problem (I have pcs with 2 & 4 GB in both OS's).
Vista Business will do the trick