Syflex and hardware

[xsi_fanatic]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if I could get some feedback on this. If I wanted to go heavy on Syflex, which hardware is gives more juice ? Is it RAM dependent ? GPU ? CPU ? or both, CPU and RAM ?

If it is the RAM, I was thinking of going up to 64 GBs. Is it worth it and what's your opinion ?

Thanks,
Jason

[Mathaeus]

Hello,

afaik Syflex depends on CPU. It's multi threaded, so you should be able to benefit of multiple CPUs or cores.
RAM, I'd say just enough to do not have troubles. GPU, only what SI needs for displaying.
Now it really depends, how heavy. While Syflex is created for big projects and huge counts of polygons, simulating a very very high res mesh is serious task for any simulator. If simulation engine, itself, can't push a huge resolution, no one hardware can help. I'd be optimist here, but, never hurt to try.

[xsi_fanatic]

Thank you for the feedback. I was thinking of upgrading my RAM. Coz Mootzoid told me his plugins depend on RAM (especially the emPolygonizer) so wasn't sure how that applied to Syflex.

[Mathaeus]

Thank you for the feedback. I was thinking of upgrading my RAM. Coz Mootzoid told me his plugins depend on RAM (especially the emPolygonizer) so wasn't sure how that applied to Syflex.

polygonizer and cloth simulator are pretty different beasts, imho. Anyway, I've played a lot with Syflex, both for animation and cloth modeling. For second case, I wanted more details. Highest resolution I've tried, was about 80k quads ( that is about 280*280 grid). It fitted nicely into available 8 GB RAM, but simulation speed on my ancient 1-threaded Syflex was about 0.1 FPS or less. With self-collision ( means significant slowdown), but also with a number of optimizations, because it wasn't important to get it consistent through the frames (lower precision, lower damping quality).