Impact of RAM quantity and number of GPU

Sysadmins Workstations
1

Hi All.

Hardware consideration here.

I have 2 Flame, on 2018 HP Z8 with Intel Xeon Gold 6136 CPU, 96GB Ram and P6000 24GB Vram. As I basically only use one (and keep the other for very times of the year only) My question is would that be a huge performance upgrade to move the RAM from one machine to the other and then have 192GB. And what about the GPU? Are we still using the second GPU for background tasks or can we use both to work (Flame 2026.2). In a word, should I keep a spare machine or would I really benefit in making a bigger one out of these two?

Hope I’m clear.

Just to say, I have the possibility to built a Flame on MacStudio, if I really need a second machine for a time.

2

More RAM will definitely help on larger comps with complex batches.

The 2nd GPU can only be utilised for Background Reactor, Flame won’t utilise dual GPUs in any other way.

One alternative option would be to keep both systems as is and make one of them a Burn node.

3

But probably burn would be quite close to a second GPU in background reactor rendering , am I wrong?

4

Yes and no. I have tried both options over the years and there are pros and cons to both.

i have found that background reactor can slow down your system on big comps so much that you may as well be rendering in the foreground as it becomes unusable. I’ve found Burn better for this, even though I haven’t had a burn setup for years now so could be different.

Background reactor is much better in my opinion for quick timeline rendering. So really useful and much faster than Burn during conforms, online/mastering sessions, etc;

This is purely my own humble opinion and I haven’t used either for a while being completely honest so this may have changed.

5

Thanks. All of It makes sense. I think background reactor would probably be the way to go for me. I do regret that flame cannot use 2 GPU at the same time. Mainly now with Machine learning things and inferences. It would have been so cool that one GPU dedicated to ML stuff while the other would still be focused on everything else!!!.
Thanks again for your feedback.

6

I believe there is work in progress to have ML functions use a 2nd GPU in the main app. So there is hope. It came up in the 2027 Logik Live presentations.

7

OMG that would be soooo cool.

I still need to cran a GPU Nevers than my old P6000…