Hi
, I will soon be using the garagefarm GPU rendering system with Octane.
Do you know what type of license I need to rent to use the 10 graphics cards (GTX1080 Ti) of their virtual server please?
Currently I rent a licence studio limited to two GPUs. But if I rent a corporate license and 10 corporate slave nodes, will it work properly?
Thank you in advance for your answers
About GPU rendering on garage farm and Octane licence
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That looks interesting. If the virtualized machine really reads as one box with 10 GPUs at the system/hardware level, then it should work with a single Enterprise license. The whole Otoy license server thing could be tricky on a virtualized machine, though. Virtual machines can be a huge headache when it comes to how they see their own hardware. You definitely want to do some thorough testing on as close to real-world files before you commit to anything, or make any promises to clients.
Animation Technical Director - Washington DC
That's great to hear! I'm sure I'm not the only one who would appreciate it if you can share some real-world numbers once you've got some production time under your belt with one of these virtual rigs.francois wrote:I did a test with a enterprise license. I have access to 10 gtx 1080 Ti and it works perfectly
The problems with scaling efficiency on the various render farm options out there make them less than attractive for modest size jobs. Virtualization of individual, but heavy-horsepower workstations might be the solution we've been waiting for. I still have my eye on Octane RNDR, but I'm not holding my breath.
Animation Technical Director - Washington DC
I’ve done some of my own testing over the last few days, and for what it is, I'm impressed with GarageFarm/Xesktop remote rendering for C4D/Octane. (I am not affiliated in any way with GarageFarm or Xesktop.) There are some downsides, however. Here's some general info for anyone who might be interested in using their service.
First, unlike the Physical/Arnold/V-Ray/Corona render engines supported with C4D, GarageFarm does not directly support C4D/Octane, or any other GPU based system. For GPUs, they send you to xesktop.com where you can use a basic, un-managed, virtual remote workstation. Again, this is not a rendering service; there is no automation, no specially designed render manager. It’s just a pretty beefy virtual machine that you can use however you want.
The Xesktop system I tested was their 10x GTX 1080 Ti 11GB setup at $6/hour. They also have an 8x Tesla V100 16GB option that’s about 50% faster but at twice the price. It's not clear how "virtual" this machine is, under the hood, whether it's actually using shared resources in a server cluster as with AWS instances, or if you are really getting remote access to a single, dedicate, well equipped machine. If it's the first, they've done a very good job making it perform like the second.
You install whatever software you want on the virtual/remote machine, and you are responsible for licensing the software. The system and all its installed software is saved as an image between sessions. It takes anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes for a cold boot and the clock starts running after boot is complete. Billing is by the minute of system up time, whether or not you are using it for anything, and includes any time you spend installing software, upgrading, managing the system etc. All working project files and renders are placed on an attached storage volume, not the boot volume. This attached storage is available via FTP whether or not the virtual machine is running. Once the VM is running, you access it via a Remote Desktop client. I was using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and I don’t know if other clients are compatible.
Next, the good: The 10x 1080 Ti configuration that I tested scaled very linearly, taking advantage of all GPUs in exactly the same way a real workstation box would. There’s none of the odd efficiency curve issues you see when dealing with something like managing nodes through Deadline or a similar task/batch distribution and assembly system. With those systems it can be very inefficient when rendering lots of relatively small/fast frames. Render time/cost estimation is very accurate on this system, unlike other cloud services. It’s very much what you see is what you get. An estimate that works on your own workstation really does translate accurately to the virtual machine. There should be no surprises when it comes how long a job will actually take, which is a major plus.
You can see my evaluation of ORC along those lines from several months ago in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29544&p=368659&hili ... cy#p368659
The not so good: Although this is a remote workstation with the full C4D app, and the Octane Live Viewer and C4D Picture Viewer give you normal feedback, the video drivers/C4D/Remote Desktop combination I had left all the standard C4D view panes blank. The only visible scene content was rendered. (I didn’t dig into this to see what solutions there might be, if any.) This means you're not going to do much in the way of tweaking a scene file once it's on the VM, unless you can do it comfortably only seeing your scene via the Live Viewer. In short, even though it’s a full setup, unless the driver quirk can be resolved, you’ll still probably need to do some of the inevitable tweaking locally before uploading the scene to the remote system. (Edit: I've been told that the Team Viewer remote desktop app fixes this OpenGL screen drawing problem. I've used it for family support for years, and like it a lot, but the business license starts at $600/year, which may be a bit steep for some.)
Another not-so-good: any licensing based on hardware MAC addresses won’t work on this virtual machine; every time you boot, you may have a different address. Since both Octane and C4D R21 use network based licensing, they are fine, but there are lots of hardware based licensing plugins and such that will not work without baking them on your local machine, first.
Lastly, you obviously don’t get any of the handy tools that come with a full render management system. You can certainly install additional software on your boot image, if you choose, including using your own .bat files, running your own scripts, using C4D’s Render Queue, third party render controllers, etc.
Overall, Xesktop.com virtual workstations seem to be a nice solution for modest sized jobs with a reasonable budget, and address a segment of the market that the big render farms don’t handle well.
First, unlike the Physical/Arnold/V-Ray/Corona render engines supported with C4D, GarageFarm does not directly support C4D/Octane, or any other GPU based system. For GPUs, they send you to xesktop.com where you can use a basic, un-managed, virtual remote workstation. Again, this is not a rendering service; there is no automation, no specially designed render manager. It’s just a pretty beefy virtual machine that you can use however you want.
The Xesktop system I tested was their 10x GTX 1080 Ti 11GB setup at $6/hour. They also have an 8x Tesla V100 16GB option that’s about 50% faster but at twice the price. It's not clear how "virtual" this machine is, under the hood, whether it's actually using shared resources in a server cluster as with AWS instances, or if you are really getting remote access to a single, dedicate, well equipped machine. If it's the first, they've done a very good job making it perform like the second.
You install whatever software you want on the virtual/remote machine, and you are responsible for licensing the software. The system and all its installed software is saved as an image between sessions. It takes anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes for a cold boot and the clock starts running after boot is complete. Billing is by the minute of system up time, whether or not you are using it for anything, and includes any time you spend installing software, upgrading, managing the system etc. All working project files and renders are placed on an attached storage volume, not the boot volume. This attached storage is available via FTP whether or not the virtual machine is running. Once the VM is running, you access it via a Remote Desktop client. I was using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and I don’t know if other clients are compatible.
Next, the good: The 10x 1080 Ti configuration that I tested scaled very linearly, taking advantage of all GPUs in exactly the same way a real workstation box would. There’s none of the odd efficiency curve issues you see when dealing with something like managing nodes through Deadline or a similar task/batch distribution and assembly system. With those systems it can be very inefficient when rendering lots of relatively small/fast frames. Render time/cost estimation is very accurate on this system, unlike other cloud services. It’s very much what you see is what you get. An estimate that works on your own workstation really does translate accurately to the virtual machine. There should be no surprises when it comes how long a job will actually take, which is a major plus.
You can see my evaluation of ORC along those lines from several months ago in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29544&p=368659&hili ... cy#p368659
The not so good: Although this is a remote workstation with the full C4D app, and the Octane Live Viewer and C4D Picture Viewer give you normal feedback, the video drivers/C4D/Remote Desktop combination I had left all the standard C4D view panes blank. The only visible scene content was rendered. (I didn’t dig into this to see what solutions there might be, if any.) This means you're not going to do much in the way of tweaking a scene file once it's on the VM, unless you can do it comfortably only seeing your scene via the Live Viewer. In short, even though it’s a full setup, unless the driver quirk can be resolved, you’ll still probably need to do some of the inevitable tweaking locally before uploading the scene to the remote system. (Edit: I've been told that the Team Viewer remote desktop app fixes this OpenGL screen drawing problem. I've used it for family support for years, and like it a lot, but the business license starts at $600/year, which may be a bit steep for some.)
Another not-so-good: any licensing based on hardware MAC addresses won’t work on this virtual machine; every time you boot, you may have a different address. Since both Octane and C4D R21 use network based licensing, they are fine, but there are lots of hardware based licensing plugins and such that will not work without baking them on your local machine, first.
Lastly, you obviously don’t get any of the handy tools that come with a full render management system. You can certainly install additional software on your boot image, if you choose, including using your own .bat files, running your own scripts, using C4D’s Render Queue, third party render controllers, etc.
Overall, Xesktop.com virtual workstations seem to be a nice solution for modest sized jobs with a reasonable budget, and address a segment of the market that the big render farms don’t handle well.
Animation Technical Director - Washington DC