I had the day off work today, so having nothing better to do, I decided to race raz0r (PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz, OS X 10.4.1) and media (Pentium III 933mhz, Ubuntu linux (Hoary)) in rendering with Blender.
raz0r, rendering frame #15 from Magnets: The Movie, required 313MB RAM, and took 2:30 mins to render the frame at 400×300.
media required 380MB RAM, and took 3:40 mins to render the same frame at the same size.
In the words of Stormy Waters, “Smoked that bitch!”. I was expecting the outcome to be along those lines, but I’m not sure why linux requires almost 70MB more RAM to render the same frame.
The output pictures from both were identical, obviously.