Consultant’s Corner: Building a Workstation for Blender

A recent call from a customer came with a unique problem: She needed a system optimized to run Blender, a program that Puget Labs has not yet directly tested. Blender is an open-source application used for a host of content creation, from animation and visual effects, to virtual reality, rendering, and computer games.

OctaneBench 2019 Performance Preview

OTOY is nearing completion of OctaneBench 2019, the first version of their OctaneRender benchmark to support the new RTX technology in NVIDIA’s Turing-based GeForce and Quadro video cards. We will do a full performance roundup when OB 2019 is finished, but for now I wanted to put out a quick preview of the performance increase that RTX tech can bring to GPU rendering.

NVIDIA RTX Graphics Card Cooling Issues

With the RTX series of GPUs, NVIDIA has moved to using dual fans as the standard cooling layout on their GeForce and Titan video cards. This is a big change from past generations and has even bigger implications for using NVIDIA graphics cards in multi-GPU workstations. Let’s look at what changed, what it impacts, and what can be done to work around it.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 – Mercury Playback Engine

Traditionally, over at least the past 15 years, the main role of a video card in a computer has been to accelerate 3D graphics. That is a large part of what has made modern computer games possible, and it has also contributed heavily to CAD / CAM work and digital animation. Video cards have also helped with 2D graphics and video playback, but the main focus has been on 3D speed.