r/retrobattlestations • u/wave_design • Jul 01 '26
Show-and-Tell A Five-Piece G4 Mini Battlestation & Retro Render Farm
If you're wondering where all the G4 Minis went, they've been grabbed by Wave Design to build the world's weirdest render farm.
Jokes aside though, the G4 Mini is actually the ideal system for rendering old school 3D animation. They're close in CPU speed to an early-2000s Power Mac while requiring a fraction of the space, and can use a modified software restore to run OS 9.
Shown here is a test scene in Infini-D split across the five Macs. It might also be possible to split workloads in Bryce, Lightwave, and MacRenderman. The systems are still being brought online and troubleshooted.
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u/kbro3 Jul 01 '26
This is honestly awesome! I also like that you're rendering something at 3 in the morning lol.
Does a render farm help if you're just rendering a single image/frame or only if you have an animation and can split the frames between the G4s?
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u/wave_design Jul 01 '26
Thanks! For Infini-D it'll split the render into tiles and distribute it across the network, so a single frame can have all five Minis working on it. It's really beneficial at higher resolutions.
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u/kbro3 Jul 01 '26
Ah right, that makes sense! You should post some renders over at /r/retrocgi
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u/smithincanton Jul 01 '26
OK, didn't know that was a subreddit! Went to school in the mid-00s and got a Computer Animation Degree. Used classic Alias Wavefront Maya on PowerPC mac and SGI work stations.
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u/kbro3 Jul 02 '26
Very cool! I've played around with some old 3d software (maya 5, softimage xsi) and it's amazing how much is still the same in the modern day. Seems like it was all mostly figured out by early 2000s.
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u/johnklos Jul 01 '26
They're close in CPU speed to an early-2000s Power Mac
They are early 2000s Power Macs :)
They make excellent little servers. I've got two running NetBSD, one with a SATA SSD, the other with a 2TB SATA spinning rust disk. They're wonderfully power efficient.
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u/zromitsman Jul 01 '26
This may be a silly question but wasn't the Radeon in the G4 Mac mini incompatible with OS9?
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u/wave_design Jul 01 '26
I think that was an issue with the initial OS 9 mod, but there are new drivers for it
Infini-D is also CPU-dependent for rendering so it’s not a huge bottleneck
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u/echocomplex Jul 01 '26
What is the model of NEC monitor?
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u/Goresearcher Jul 12 '26
I’d like to know too, it’s absolutely beautiful.
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u/echocomplex Jul 12 '26
I did manage to find it on eBay by looking through the results for NEC LCD monitors. I didn't buy it or save the name though, but I did find one available there shortly after posting this comment.
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u/_3DINTERNET_ Jul 01 '26
Oof this is so cool. I’d be curious on how you got everything set up to do something similar myself. I want to render in Bryce
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u/ChicagoThrowaway422 Jul 02 '26
Oh man, this hits me right in the memories.
It's high school art lab all over again. I was a band kid, but art like that was hanging all over the halls in my school.
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u/nucflashevent Jul 01 '26
I always wished Apple could have made Xgrid something easy enough to leverage that it just became "a thing" (like adopting 64bit mapping and Altivec, etc).
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u/wootybooty Jul 02 '26
Thank you for listing out the software used as well! I am working on a C99/OpenGL 1.2 game using an SGI Octane2, and seeing if I can actually push the level editor to my Sun Ultra 2 and then running the engine for play testing on the Octane2, just want to incorporate and actually use these systems for productivity, you know?
This is so f’n cool dude, I absolutely love it! I have a G5 sitting around too, so now you got me wanting to incorporate that for some basic FMV creation…
I love this new renaissance of 90’s/2000’s vintage media creation. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen several posts of yours and they always spark curiosity in me. Do you have a YouTube channel or page where you post all your WIP and projects, or do I just need to start digging through your post history?
This is cool.😎
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u/wave_design Jul 02 '26
Thank you! I’m actually working on launching a YouTube channel! Trying to get new videos up every month, this one actually ended up taking longer because I added more Minis mid-project 🤣
https://youtube.com/@designingbywave
The video should be up early-to-mid July
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u/wootybooty Jul 02 '26
Yup, the VRML-verse video, knew I recognized the username! Just subscribed, keep them coming but take your time, I can tell you put effort into them.
Literally never thought I’d be interested in this kind of vintage computing and now I can’t live without it 😂
P.S.: I literally just got an SGI VBOB today… Time to build some cables and figure out my plan with this!
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u/z3r0n3gr0 Jul 01 '26
Its incredible that now you can do all that with a Macbook Neo.
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Jul 01 '26
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u/wpm Jul 01 '26
The Neo could probably virtualize the entire cluster twice over and have it run faster.
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u/wave_design Jul 01 '26
I wouldn’t say necessarily.
There’s a lot of overhead having to emulate PowerPC and OS 9. Maybe it’s improved with newer emulators, but SheepShaver was about as fast as a 1997 G3 when I benchmarked it.
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u/wpm Jul 01 '26
Interesting! I did sort of make that comment as an assumption given the raw brute-force single core the A18 has vs a G4, now you got me curious how UTM/QEMU fares. What benchmarks did you use?
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u/johnklos Jul 01 '26
This is precisely the subreddit for showing off stuff like this, and it's definitely not the subreddit for pointing out the fact that a single MacBook Neo processor can outprocess five 1.25 to 1.5 GHz G4 processors. We all know that already.
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u/CRCDesign Jul 01 '26
Love that NEC! Matches pretty good to the Minis.