I coudn’t resist and downloaded the 15 days trial version of Mari from The Foundry.
I did this the day it came out on July 16th and immediately ran into a glitch with their online shop, which their support with some help from me was able to resolve and I finally got my 15 day license.
Well at least now I know what the Mari logo stands for:
This is my computer being crushed by the resource demands of Mari 🙂
It seems, my graphic card is just too old/limited to handle the workload Mari is giving to it. It runs, but quite slowly. I have a Geforce 8500GT based card with 512MB.
I meet all the Mari system recommendations expect with the graphics card, where they recommend at least 1GB of RAM and Quadro FX cards.
Well, at least I could try out a lot of aspects of Mari and see how immensely useful this tool could be. With some considerations on workflow it is quite usable in a pipeline with blender.
The price tag of 846 EUR (including tax in the EU) , although low in comparison to Photoshop, is still too high for me, especially considering the accompanying mandatory update of my graphics hardware.
After all it was (and for 6 days still is) a great experience and leaves me with one important insight:
I will have to invest in a graphics card update.
Until now I considered my 8500GT adequate to run my applications and (old) games. With the advent of all the GPU accelerated software I think this evaluation is no longer valid.
