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The Linux Stack
August 30, 2000
Lord of the Rings Being
Rendered Under Linux
Timothy
Did you really think Jackson and company would be stupid enough to try to render special effects shots under Windows 2000? :-) -- MATTHEW
Came across this article in the New Zealand Herald the other day. Seems that Weta Digital is now moving over to Linux for the rendering work on Lord of the Rings. Two quotes from the article especially caught my eye:
[1)] 'We were able to get the SGI 1200 servers for about $15,000 each or $7500 a processor, and they run more than twice as fast as the [$40000] Octanes for pure rendering.'
[and 2)] 'Just by putting in a Linux processor, the price to do a frame is up to a tenth of the cost as on an SGI workstation [running SGI's Irix operating system] so the things we can attempt are more complex.'