OTOY Forums

Hi all,

You guys have more experience than I have and I'm just curious.
Is there any benefit to building a render farm for CPU rendering like mental-ray, V-RAY etc. over buying the Octane render 2.0 and go for GPU rendering?

I just find a new render farm case here : http://3drenderfarm.com

I know it is more expensive but maybe it is more useful to populate one of these than always buying the best available GPU.

There are obvious benefits like more memory and continuous operation for home made render farm, but there are benefits for GPU rendering as well.

Please give me some guidance.

firstly, upgrading CPUs is not so easy and cheap as upgrading GPUs, you not always need the best GPU, for example the GTX 780 6GB is perfect for net rendering right now.
secondary, the power of octane net render is usable also during the scene preparation, not only at final rendering; and this is something not possible with CPU renderfarms, as far as i know
and last but not least, an octane with unlimited render nodes is on the go... so don't esitate to switch
ciao beppe

Hi,

there is no right or wrong.
Depends on your needs.
For home use it´s more flexible to go for GPU Rendering, also lower cost all together. (if counting price of motherbord, cpus and finally energy, gpu are more efficient, from 6xx and above)
If your projects are not top secret, and you have a need of much renderpower (for a certain time), you should make use of cloud render farms, like the amazon cluster for GPU or something like rebusfarm for CPU with vray for example.
It make no sense at all to build a render farm at home if you will not use it at leats 75% per day, means 18h per day on 100% workload.

Ciao
Andreas

Thanks you the answers. It is a little bit clearer now.

Bye

Which 3D app and which renderer do you need to use? Octane doesn't work for everyone, so it kind of depends on your needs.

I'm using 3ds max I found the mental ray is stunning for rendering. This is why I try to find something for CPU rendering.

But I am still open for the option to upgrade for Octane 2.0