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What is the cheapest solution for a network node (2 - 4 gpu's)?
Do I need a complete stand-alone system (hdd, ram, dvd etc) or are there simpler configurations?

RobSteady wrote:What is the cheapest solution for a network node (2 - 4 gpu's)?
Do I need a complete stand-alone system (hdd, ram, dvd etc) or are there simpler configurations?

how much ... You need? :

CPU power
GPU vRAM

other needs? You clearlly don't need DVD (instaling from USB will work faster =)

There are expander box option, but it will cost ~ 1.5-2k for the box without GPU, but You can put 4 dual GPU cards inside =)

Let's say 2 x 780 Ti 6GB
I've got a system config here for around 600€

Very curious about this as well. A cheap system with a good quality power supply and some decent GPU's is very interesting as a render farm solution for me.

How much of a performance increase will we see? Adding another GPU internally is pretty much a 100% boost and I'm guessing a networked GPU won't be the same but is it close to %100 per GPU increase or much lower?

Obizzz wrote:Very curious about this as well. A cheap system with a good quality power supply and some decent GPU's is very interesting as a render farm solution for me.

How much of a performance increase will we see? Adding another GPU internally is pretty much a 100% boost and I'm guessing a networked GPU won't be the same but is it close to %100 per GPU increase or much lower?

No doubt the 1Gb standard network connection will slow down data transfer quite a bit. But I would think that would only effect scene loading times. Once it's in graphics memory, it's good to go, and sending the updated pixels back to your display isn't bandwidth intensive.

My other question would be how much CPU power would be needed for such a GPU setup? Since it's not gaming, and everything takes place on the PCIe bus, might be able to save some money on the CPU/motherboard to put towards another GPU or better cooling.

As far as power requirements go, I've found that a 750watt works for most 2 card setups. I have a redshift render farm, and most of my nodes consist of 2 x GTX760, with some 770's and 780's in the mix also. I never usually go above 2 cards per render node.

The network rendering feature is the thing that's going to make Octane actually useful for me.

adrencg wrote:As far as power requirements go, I've found that a 750watt works for most 2 card setups.

Yep 750W shouldn't be a problem in a render node especially as you won't have anything else power hungry in such a setup.

Yeah for around 600Eu

You can get cheap mobo for two cards + low quad (with cooler) + PSU (650W) + 16gb of RAM + CASE + SSD (~128gb)..- should be enough for decent slave.

You can cut prices getting lower..for HDD instead of SSD, leaving the case of & having DIY option..getting even slower CPU..

as for power: two 780 seems to eat just about 500W so - incase of weaker CPU bundled with SSD & simple mobo ..there should be enough power left from GPU's to feed the rest of the system.

AMD route might give a bit of better value (checked only intel) as they really try to compete hard in price at lower segment.

Regarding the requirements for network rendering:

An Octane net render slave is fairly dumb. All the render data processing is done on the master side, i.e. a slave doesn't need a super powerful CPU. Of course, you will need enough RAM to store the render data, plus some render results. You can also use Linux as OS, since the communication is cross platform. No data is stored on disc, it all happens 100% in memory.

The only thing that is important is that you use Gbit Ethernet, since it's not too much fun to have to wait for the data to transmit over 100Mbps. We are trying to minimize the amount of stuff that needs to be sent, but it can easily be more than 1GByte of data. On the Gbit Ethernet we have at the office, we reach an actual data rate of about 100MByte/s and it's quite nice for the scenes we have been testing it with.

I hope that helps,
Marcus

abstrax wrote:Regarding the requirements for network rendering:

An Octane net render slave is fairly dumb. All the render data processing is done on the master side, i.e. a slave doesn't need a super powerful CPU. Of course, you will need enough RAM to store the render data, plus some render results. You can also use Linux as OS, since the communication is cross platform. No data is stored on disc, it all happens 100% in memory.

The only thing that is important is that you use Gbit Ethernet, since it's not too much fun to have to wait for the data to transmit over 100Mbps. We are trying to minimize the amount of stuff that needs to be sent, but it can easily be more than 1GByte of data. On the Gbit Ethernet we have at the office, we reach an actual data rate of about 100MByte/s and it's quite nice for the scenes we have been testing it with.

I hope that helps,
Marcus

Thanks Marcus, that does help.

So does this mean there won't be a need for storing scene dependent assets on network drives? It sounds like all render data is first gathered/consolidated on the master machine, and then bulk transmitted to the slave. That would be cool for those who are in a mixed OS environment, which sometimes causes issues with path naming, etc.