[phromm]

Just wondering if anyone doing high-end archviz 2d renderings has recently gone through the cost analysis of buying better/faster computers vs using render farms for their renderings. Does the use of GPU rendering change the situation - use one fast machine in GPU mode vs a network of machines in CPU mode (assuming you can't network render while using GPU)? Any input is greatly appreciated!

[Pomrose]

Hi ,

I haven't done any cost analysis, but farms are getting cheaper and faster. In my opinion a lot of the work is done when setting up the render,lots of starts and stops small changes etc. So having a very fast computer to work is better as you can get the result you are looking for.

GPU doesn't work for all situations, I understand it work well on simple scenes and exterior shots.

good luck !

[Eduardo G]

It's much cheaper to use a Render Farm. It would be mad for someone to spend a million of euros in render nodes and let them stay stopped 99% of the time...
with a Render Farm you can access massive render power at a controlled cost.

That being said you should buy a computer with a good price/performance ratio. For Maxwell we recommend going for an AMD Threadripper 1950X.

About the GPU's, they're still very limited, mainly in terms of memory. Many of our users complex scenes require 64 or even 128GB of memory. That's simply impossible to achieve, at the moment, with a GPU.

[mjcherry]

After reading this post last night, I decided to give Next Limit's render farm a shot. I haven't had good experiences using a render farm with Maxell up till now, and didn't expect too much.

I was wrong.

Their service is fantastic! All the BS usually required to render a Maxwell image with other render farms is gone and the price was RIGHT! I was actually days away from ordering a bunch of older Dell server blades to make my own farm - forget it! It's not as fast to start as a completely automated farm, but that's a good thing - you actually have someone who knows what they're doing running the render! In less than an hour I got back a folder with the MXI, and a perfect TIFF - all channels.

I'm a very happy customer. Give it a shot!

[luis.hijarrubia]

After reading this post last night, I decided to give Next Limit's render farm a shot. I haven't had good experiences using a render farm with Maxell up till now, and didn't expect too much.

I was wrong.

Their service is fantastic! All the BS usually required to render a Maxwell image with other render farms is gone and the price was RIGHT! I was actually days away from ordering a bunch of older Dell server blades to make my own farm - forget it! It's not as fast to start as a completely automated farm, but that's a good thing - you actually have someone who knows what they're doing running the render! In less than an hour I got back a folder with the MXI, and a perfect TIFF - all channels.

I'm a very happy customer. Give it a shot!

Just to clarify, Next Limit doesn't have any render farm.

[mjcherry]

Ah, my bad. I thought that's who ran it.

Either way, the results were great, it happened quickly (after hours) and the price was more than fair.

Great company.

[DavidLemelin]

I recently had a new workstation built around the AMD Threadripper 1950 and two Titan video cards.

I can report that the speed of rendering stills has improved heavily compared to the networked 17 processors I was using before. A batch of 7 images 2200 px x 1500 px took 45 minutes in total (using the denoiser). On my usual network, I would have been able to leave the building and go have a three-martini lunch without getting the job rendered out.

I unfortunately can't say I'm completely amazed with the GPU renderer however. It is not especially faster than the CPU and since Maxwell can't address more than one card at a time... GPU rendering ends up being a work in progress I'm still waiting to use.

If you have the budget, a machine like this can keep your jobs self-contained in your work environment. The Threadripper is a lot cheaper than Intel's offerings and it's neat to see the techs at the computer lab light up when you tell them what you want them to build .

[Eduardo G]

Ah, my bad. I thought that's who ran it.

Either way, the results were great, it happened quickly (after hours) and the price was more than fair.

Great company.

Thanks! We're here to help