Any updates on including Render slave

[3dgeeks]

There was discussion of inclusion of a slave license when purchasing a full license. Has this been investigated further, as setting up an octane render farm is very costly compared to other renderers, eg vray, corona.

Could this be arranged soon.

[glimpse]

haven't seen any news on that topic yet =)
so it's still at the state You have in mind =)

[Goldorak]

There was discussion of inclusion of a slave license when purchasing a full license. Has this been investigated further, as setting up an octane render farm is very costly compared to other renderers, eg vray, corona.

Could this be arranged soon.

There'll be announcement soon about the new licensing options we're adding, which are intended to make network rendering more cost effective.

What metrics were you using to measure your projected costs? In every scenario we've explored, CPU renderfarms - in terms of cost per node/per dollar - are much more expensive to scale than GPU ones when comparing identical render jobs.

One datapoint: The fist version of the Brigade path tracer included a highly optimized x64 multi-core CPU version. It had feature parity with the GPU version - making it pretty easy to figure out cost/render on both types of HW. We discovered that you needed ~$3000 Intel Xeons (dual sockets - the max system could handle) to come close to the speed of a single $300 GPU consumer card when rendering identical frames. When you added 4 more GPUs in that system's PCIe slots, Brigade GPU scaled to 5x faster than the CPU version - while still half the HW cost of the CPUs . That means a 10x savings in render/cost between GPU/CPU - just on a single box. When you scale beyond one box to multiple nodes in a renderfarm, this delta becomes even higher.

[riggles]

Perhaps the OP was referring specifically to node licensing costs.

I'm curious about the Brigade test you mentioned. Is Brigade an unbiased path tracer? If so, I think that test showed that the GPU was more effective at unbiased path tracing more than anything, no? It'd be interesting to see comparisons between Corona and Octane. I'm kinda doubting a $300 gaming card would still beat a $3,000 Xeon there.