Hardware upgrade policy at work

East

Do you guys have any defined hardware upgrade policy at your workplace?

I'm at work right now over the weekend due to a home invasion at the flat, and in the empty office I notice that right now all but two of us artists are stuck with these crappy 22" Dell monitors, on which you can put a fullscreen flat colour and get a gradient from top to bottom, and have it shift to pink or blue at tiny viewing angle differences...

... while I'm seeing designers, producers, animators, and QA with the newer models, which after a quick look don't seem have these issues, or at the very least have significantly less pronounced issues.

So I can only assume we just take the newest hardware and give to the newest people, without considering what would make most sense, and thus not really have a defined hardware upgrade policy.

What about you guys? Do you have one that works? I'd love to hear how other studios handle this.. what works, and what doesn't work.

Joshua Stubbles

At Turn10, artists have the priority for the swanky hardware. We have the newest PC's, monitors and HDTV's. The devs work doesn't require all of the top end hardware and such - they're just coding, not pushing geometry and textures. All of the artists here have the same PC & OS, same HDTV tuned to the same settings, same calibrated monitors, etc.

Ghostscape

Here at Volition all the artists have a calibrated test monitor, a huey pro for our calibrated work monitor+ secondary monitor, and I think we're in line first for upgrades, too. Our art leads are usually pushing hard on IT to make sure we have everything we need and can maintain consistency. We've also got a project manager chain that we can bitch up through in addition to the art lead chain, so we've got plenty of ways to make sure we're taken care of - when I bitched that my computer couldn't handle the high poly model for something I was working on (huge fucking asset) my manager got me upgraded in a few days. Like I think it was two, tops.

I don't think we have a specific set of rules, more like guidelines. I don't know of any artists that suffer, though.

But we've got a huge studio and are publisher owned - maybe you don't have that same level of financial backing?

Seems really stupid to be giving a designer or non-graphics programmer a better monitor than an artist who needs accurate color management, though.

Isn't there a chain of command that you can bitch to about a crap monitor?

Jeremy Lindstrom

i had a previous discussion similar to this..
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=69741

where I work it's total crap. my laptop at home is faster then my work PC..

I often have to close 3dsmax to open photoshop and/or when trying to test things in our game.

I have a

Intel Core Duo 2.66GHz
2 gig of ram
Nvidia 8800 GTS
(brought my own small wacom tablet in)
have a 22 inch noname lcd, and a 19inch lcd.. both 16:9..

Joshua Stubbles

Lol Jeremy - yeah CRS is pretty limited. Wish those guys could get more funding. They're a good group of people and they're dedicated as all hell.

East

Thanks for sharing, guys

We are owned by one of the top entertainment behemoths in the world, so money isn't really a huge issue, as far as I can tell. I think it's more of a growing pain issue since in 2 years we've grown from 40-some people to around 120, and no one's probably had time to sit down and think about it too much.

Also, since our studio does anything from DS to PS3 titles, it's probably a hassle to keep everyone with appropriate hardware, especially when people move between projects a lot. I do have leads I can talk to about this, but I figured I'd see how things work in other studios first, so what I suggest isn't completely absurd and unrealistic

It is a bit of an eye opener to see you guys talk about monitor calibration. I brought this up when I started working here, but it was dismissed as "not necessary", or something similar.

Jeremy Lindstrom

does the windows7 monitor calibration work well at all?

JasonLavoie

Jeremy Lindstrom wrote: »

does the windows7 monitor calibration work well at all?

This just peeked my interest... moar info please and thanks!

Ghostscape

East wrote: »

Thanks for sharing, guys

We are owned by one of the top entertainment behemoths in the world, so money isn't really a huge issue, as far as I can tell. I think it's more of a growing pain issue since in 2 years we've grown from 40-some people to around 120, and no one's probably had time to sit down and think about it too much.

Also, since our studio does anything from DS to PS3 titles, it's probably a hassle to keep everyone with appropriate hardware, especially when people move between projects a lot. I do have leads I can talk to about this, but I figured I'd see how things work in other studios first, so what I suggest isn't completely absurd and unrealistic

It is a bit of an eye opener to see you guys talk about monitor calibration. I brought this up when I started working here, but it was dismissed as "not necessary", or something similar.

With so many people on a team calibration becomes an issue to maintain consistency across assets - otherwise you wind up with each artist making something that looks good on their monitor, but then you find out Joe's assets are slightly bluer and Jim's have less contrast, and East has a gradient on all his images to compensate for his dying monitor

Autocon

All artists and basically anyone doing work that requires accurate color reproduction had there monitors calibrated. From everything else I can tell artists generally will get the better hardware do to the fact that its more important to there work then others.