CPU or GPU render farms.

[brendancotterell]

Hello all,

 

So ive been doing Archviz for a little while now but nothing mainstream, I have just landed a large contract with a business and am in need of speeding up my workflow render times. Now by reading around a lot of people are comparing GPU vs CPU rendering.

 

The downfall of GPU is not everything works with it. Such as plugins, materials ect. But the upside its very fast for finding what your scene will look like on a rough scale.

 

Another thing is cost, I have two 1080's and i7 the two 1080's cost me $2400. Now on load the heat they produce is crazy. I even have them on water and it still heats up my office.

 

So with that I went and got a few servers both have 12 cores 24 threads 64gig ram with another one on the way at 40 cores 80 threads. All up cost less than $4600. My current servers produce 350watts each on load While my main PC the GTX 1080 uses 180watts on load for each card. So power really is not an issue.

 

But anyway my question is, is it better getting CPU for render farms or GPUs. Yet I can get great deals on servers with lots of cores. For $2400 I could of got another 20 core system with 64gig of ram. But a lot of people are saying CPU's are dieing out for rendering.

 

What do you guys think?

[brendancotterell]

That does not really answer my question, I am not a student I have the money to run and maintain the servers. Mind you these servers are database grade so they are very reliable. As for heat they have their own room and space while they only take a small area of that room with their own server rack. I can see what you mean by licenses but I can afford them and when buying in bulk they are quite cheap. The setup for network CPU rendering was very easy to setup.

 

As for rendering quality not a lot of software/plugins work with GPU rendering nor does it look as good as CPU rendering especially if you are rendering for 10k+ scale.

 

I am juggling between CPU quality of rendering vs GPU rendering while each card cost me $1200 while they are crammed together on a typical motherboard generating LOTS of heat. While I can go the other way and get good amount of servers and not have to worry about missing out on great plugins/software that only works with CPU rendering, speed wise my current CPU's are very quick.

 

I am trying to find someone who has build their own render farm who can show me why GPU's or why CPU's

[aaronrumple]

I think GPU farms are still somewhat esoteric and limited for general production rendering. Great for RT previews. I think they can be great for specific workflows as well - but that would be a specific type/style of scene you do over and over with predictable input/output. CPU is solid and flexible if you're doing lots of different types of work - and as you mentioned - the least restrictive in workflow and plugins. If I were to expand my farm - I'd be looking at used server chips. These pop up when datacenters switch things out and then flood the used market with perfectly good silicon. It might not be cutting edge, but the speed to price point is great. My next farm would also be Linux based. My Linux servers are rock solid and simple to maintain. The cost savings on just windows and deploying backburner will be worth it.