/3/ - 3DCG

[Anonymous No.940627]

I hope this isn't too /g/ or too meta, but how is your render hardware setup?

Just going for your own super workstation with the beefiest CPU and GPU? Making your own little renderfarm with whatever you can find? Rendering on raspis or smartphones for the lulz?

Any good guides on setting up clusters or farms?

[Anonymous No.940634]

unfortunately you get what you pay for in this world. There's no secret sauce for a cheap render station. Get an empty computer case and poor money into it. The more the better.

[Anonymous No.940641]

>>940634
>unfortunately you get what you pay for in this world.
Lol what got me interested in this question is that my job has dozens of computers that just sit idle every day from 5pm to 7am.
None of them would be a great render station on its own, but surely the collected might of 40 of them would give better results than anything I could build at home

[Anonymous No.940642]

I recommend renting nodes in a render farm in bursts rather than spending money on a local farm.

[Anonymous No.941146]

>>940641
How to get fired: speedrun

[Anonymous No.941336]

>>940642
Depends highly on what renderer you're using, and your other needs like plugins. If you want to use online farms, you need to build your projects around that from the start, or hope you find one that supports everything you use. Sufficient farms can easily end up costing you over 10 000€ just for a 10 minute short film. At that point, it's just better to buy your own hardware. Even when considering the electricity bill.

[Anonymous No.941359]

>>940627
I use several old dell optiplexes with a PSU upgrade and 2x Vega 56 . Rendering under 8gb vram isnt a problem for me and two vegas are as fast as my 3090. A farm of 3060ti or 1660ti is probably smarter though, since I can only use opencl renderers on my farm no cuda.

[Anonymous No.941360]

>>941359
>a farm of 8gb and less vram video cards
jesus man

[Anonymous No.941364]

>>940627
why are you bragging about having money when the whole economy is in the shitter?

[Anonymous No.941369]

>>941364
I don't have money though, I'm looking to see if any other poorfags have macguyvered anything neat

[Anonymous No.941370]

>>941369
I'm poor too, but instead of making some horrible render farm and tripping my breakers and trying to manage it on the very few days I actually want to render I invested in licenses for paid software that will actually get used in a pipeline

[Anonymous No.941434]

> a farm of shitty old office computers for rendering instead of one medium capable recent machine
I guess you guys don't have to pay for your own electricity bill.

[Anonymous No.941450]

>>940627
Unless you're planning to do a lot of heavy rendering on a regular basis, just rent someone else's farm. There's no point in dropping even something barebones like $5k on GPU's if you're only going to use $2000 worth of rendering time.

Look into the rates of rendering services and seriously ask yourself how much time you're gonna need. Unless you've got one hell of a project going, there is no way you can do it cheaper than a render farm business can.

[Anonymous No.943249]

>>941369

There is no mcguyvering this, modern rendering is all done on GPUs. A single good GPU can replace 3-4 workstations with decently power CPUs.

[Anonymous No.943251]

>>943249
Hey look everyone, clueless person with long history of mental retardation in family spreading completely false information on the internet!

[Anonymous No.943294]

>>943251
>u r dumb

Gee, if only i had hard numbers to back that up. Oh wait

https://opendata.blender.org/

>two of the world's fastest 96-core CPUs money can buy can't even come close to a 3070Ti

[Anonymous No.943309]

>>943251
He's not entirely wrong though. CPU based rendering is only viable for bigger studios, ignoring still renders. Everyone else, assuming they have a functional brain, has switched to GPU renderers.

[Anonymous No.943314]

>>943309
false

[Anonymous No.943321]

>>943314
By "bigger" I mean a company that employs around 10 or more people.

For the price of a single PC with a top end threadripper, you can get a PC with two 4090 cards and a consumer grade CPU, which gets the job done, for GPU rendering purposes that is. And that is lowballing it. Even one of those 4090s will render at the very minimum two times faster than the top end PC with the threadripper. Yes, there might be a small quality hit in some scenarios, but 99% of the time nothing that's worth the increased cost of using a CPU over a GPU for a indie studio much less someone who's working solo. But it of course depends what you're doing. If all you're outputting, is some short 20 second commercials or still renders, a CPU renderer is perfectly fine. But if you're doing proper animation shows/movies, or even short films, you should always go for GPU, unless you're big enough that money is not an issue.

[Anonymous No.943344]

I personally use Flamenco for Blender for my own render farm setup. https://flamenco.blender.org/usage/quickstart/

The majority of the actual computers are made with spare, old computer parts I had laying around.

I think the "cheapest" (and by extension least powerful) one in my setup used an old, SFF case and OEM motherboard I had for a early 10's Dell Inspiron. I got a used i7 that matched the processor socket (specifically the non-K model since it was cheaper and you can't overclock on an OEM mobo anyways).

I also threw in a refurbished Quadro K1200. It's only about as powerful as a GTX 750, but has 4 GB of VRAM and supports OptiX for hardware accelerated ray tracing and AI denoising.

Both parts together cost about 85 USD to get. I didn't need to upgrade the stock 250W PSU either, thankfully. I also opted to install Ubuntu since Blender tends to render slightly faster on most Linux distros, which can help make up for the weaker hardware.

If you're hunting for cheap CPUs/GPUs, opendata.blender.org can give a good idea of what the performance is like, as well as what types of hardware acceleration are supported on different kinds of GPUs (ideally you'll want to be using the same kind for every node in your farm to maintain consistency). If a GPU isn't listed, then more likely than not it doesn't support hardware acceleration.

[Anonymous No.943365]

>>943321

>wasting your time using arguments with someone who just responds with "false" and "you are retarded"

[Anonymous No.943472]

>>943249
you could make like a bitcoin miner and macguyver 10 graphics cards onto a motherboard that only has 2 pcie slots

[Anonymous No.943515]

>>943472

- Bitcoin hasn't been mined on GPUs for over a decade now
- What people used to mine until recently was Ethereum, and that can't be mined anymore
- Mining is bullshit, the fad is over

[Anonymous No.943531]

>>943294
Out of what kind of feebleminded retarded cunt did you fall out off when you were born? I was referring to simpletons claim that

>modern rendering is all done on GPUs

It's a sentence right out cognitively impaired simpleton's mouth and has NO FUCKING RELATION to reality whatsoever. Fucking retards

[Anonymous No.943582]

>>943515
while thats all true, having 10 cards on one board could still be useful for rendering

[Anonymous No.943584]

>>943582
You start getting diminishing returns pretty fast. 2 in one system is fine for example, but at some point it's just more cost effective to build a new system instead. The benchmarks in the image are on redshift.

And no matter how many you combine, you'll still be limited to the vram a single card has. They do not stack.

[Anonymous No.943594]

>>940627
i am building a system right now 24 used xeon servers with each 64gb ram and 16 cores.

1 can render the cosmo laundromat demo in 14 minutes. So from maths the system can render 4 secounds in 24fps in 1 hour. 1 minute in 24fps in 15 hours. a 30 minute film in 24fps in around 19 days.