Render farms?

Jonstark

Octane sells licenses for up to 10 computers, so theoretically I'm sure you could network render, but I've also read on the forums that you're restricted to the memory size of your smallest gpu card.  I have a gtx1070 and it seems to handle every scene I throw at it in Octane with no problems and very fast, so I'm not sure I'll ever try to expand my farm to do network rendering for Octane (the costs of the extra Nvidia cards would be substantial, not to mention the cost of buying an expanded Octane license to let me network... ouch!)

I only have 8 PC's in my little farm at the moment, 3 are laptops and 2 are dual-Xeon servers, but I have to say electric bills haven't spiked, nor is my bedroom turned into a furnace (yes, I have the whole kit and caboodle in my bedroom, which is where my workstation desk is too, probably not wise but oh well).  Everything runs quite cool and like I said I haven't seen any notable increase in my electricity use or bills either, then again I'm not rendering 24X7 at the moment either, in fact I only turn the nodes on when I want to do a final rendering; most of the time they are off.

Kevin Sanderson

You start rendering animations, Jon, you'll be able to heat your home!

 

Kendall Sears

Just for reference, a single 300W pull online 24x7 will cost approx $30US per month in electricity at $0.11/KwH.

EDIT:  The numbers:  

300w * 24H = 7200wH / 1000 = 7.2KwH /day.

7.2KwH *$0.11 = $.792/day

$.792 * 31 = $24.55 / mo in direct costs.

Factor facilities charge and taxes and you're right around $30 for one machine with 300W PSU (depending on your State) 

Kendall

whatupdub

Hi all,

Pretty new here but researching the render farm options too. Playing around with the Iray Cloud settings but don't have much else to compare it with.

Not sure if the native Iray on Daz 4.9 is able to use my current GPU (not sure if Pascal support is implemented yet), but seeing nice results for cloud compared to local.

I'm short on content to test with though. Right now, I'm trying to benchmark and get an idea of relative performance using the "Barefoot Dancer" set I found under Ready to Render. With that scene, I'm seeing about 1% progress after 8 minutes 39 seconds and 173 Iray itterations. Over the network, I'm getting 95% completion of the render in 3 minutes 43 seconds and 1133 Iray itterations.

Huge difference.

I'd like to know if anyone has had any luck with the Iray Cloud [beta] settings or has any other conversation on this topic.

For the initial question in the thread though, yes, looks like network rendering is possible. At least in beta and depending on what render engine you are using. I'm in Daz Studio 4.9 Pro.

 

Thanks!