Render Machines

[colindavidson]

Hi there,

We have been getting a huge increase of clients recently and we need to improve the speed of our renders from 9-24+ hours per render to ideally 1-2 hours per render.

We have a rough budget of $15-20k.

 

What machines would you recommend to get?

 

Thanks

Colin

[RyderSK]

Perhaps I would suggest to read the whole forum first (at least the first page), there are few choices that you can gravitate towards based on your priorities. (maintenance, performance/value,etc.. )

All possible configurations on latest architecture (from 4 cores Haswell 1155, 6 to 12 cores Haswell-E 2011-3, i7 to 2p Xeon systems) were outlined and discussed to death. It's good to go through that and than ask perhaps more specific questions.

[Dimitris Tolios]

Hi there,

We have been getting a huge increase of clients recently and we need to improve the speed of our renders from 9-24+ hours per render to ideally 1-2 hours per render.

We have a rough budget of $15-20k.

 

What machines would you recommend to get?

 

Thanks

Colin

 

 

What machines do you have now that render?

You can calculate a rough aggregate of cores x GHz for all machines contributing to a 9-24Hr render.

 

 

 

Eg. 2x Quad Core i7 @ 3GHz (2 machines x 4 cores e.a. x 3GHz = 24GHz) + 3x 2P Hex Xeon @2.6GHz (3 machines x 12 cores e.a. x 2.6GHz = 93.6GHz) = 117.6GHz* Total.

So, 117Ghz gives me 9Hr per job, I need 2Hr** per job or 9/2 = 4.5x faster -> I would need an aggregate of ~525GHz to achieve that, or the equivalent of ~ 33x 4790 i7 machines (4x4GHz ea).

 

 

Computers get "better" every generation = there is roughly a 7-10% performance increase @ same clocks, so if the machines in the 1st example yielding 9Hr/job are 1st gen i7 (5yo or so) I would guestimate that we are 3 gens ahead, i.e. roughly 20-30% faster clock for clock.

 

 

So we could actually get 2Hr with 33 - 25% = 25x 4790K machines, or 525GHz - 25% = ~ 400GHz aggregate.

 

 

There are more than one ways to get to this kind of a farm. s1150 will be the more complicated, s2011-3 1P, s2011 or 2011-3 2P etc.

You will have to balance hardware, management & software costs go your needs. I don't know if this is doable with less than $20K tho.

 

 

*I leave HT threads out, if you are keeping the comparison Intel i7/Xeon to Intel i7/Xeon, its the same

** Many of the operations taking part before the actual raytracing is happening, remain single threaded, so performance is not 100% scalable as the numbers above suggest. Even with an infinite amount of cores in a render farm, you will hit a wall due to the above bottleneck, but lets leave this aside.

Edited October 30, 2014 by dtolios