Render farm vs. small office/home rendering

Professional or hobbyist, every 3D artist hates waiting for the renders to finish. This causes a continuous quest for finding the best solution to render faster and cheaper, which in turn generates countless pages of discussions in the forums, benchmark comparisons, and of course ‘versus’ debates.

I have answered questions on this subject quite a number of times – some of them general, some of them about specific hardware and some of them about our service. My past series of articles offered a bit of background info and some ideas about what to look at when comparing rendering solutions in general. Now, I’ll try to show a more specific use case: rendering at home or in a small office, versus using a professional farm (like RenderStreet).

Before starting, a disclaimer: I am aware of the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘best for all’ answer. While a solution can be the best choice for a number of users, there are always some with particular preferences or personal requirements, who will prefer another option. So your mileage may vary, and that’s perfectly fine.

Home office: costs

From the discussions I’ve had with various artists that work from home, it turns out that a lot of people work (and render) on a laptop which is, in most cases, a MacBook. In addition to that, there may be also a desktop used for rendering, which is usually a computer equipped with an NVidia card. So I’m going to base my comparison on this average configuration.

A 15″ base model MacBook Pro costs $2,000 and it comes with a Core i7-4770HQ CPU, 16 GB of RAM and Iris Pro graphics. A high performance desktop computer with a Core i7-4790K, 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 980 TI costs about $2,600. The combination of these two offers both portability and decent rendering performance.

Compared to our servers, the notebook is approximately 3 times slower than a CPU server and 6 times slower than a GPU one. The desktop has roughly the speed of a CPU server and about half the speed of a GPU one (these numbers are just to give you an idea, not the two-decimal-points exact ones).

Workload

When we’re talking about rendering, nobody has an evenly, fully-loaded pipeline. So I’m going to discuss about two of the models that I’ve encountered more often:

1. The ‘daily render’ model. Some of the artists are constantly working on one or more smaller projects, and need to make daily revisions – either for themselves or for their clients. Over a 90-day period, considering 1 render hour per day, excluding weekends, the workload may look like this:

In this scenario, a notebook can satisfy all the rendering needs, and a second computer is not absolutely necessary. However, in the one hour that the notebook is doing the rendering, it cannot be used for anything else – whether it’s surfing the net or continuing to work on the project. A faster computer would help with that, but a $2,600 price is a bit to steep and the expense can be difficult to justify when doing the family budget.

An online alternative for that can be RenderStreet One. For only $50 per month (the equivalent of a phone bill) it offers access to a pool of servers, each one as powerful as the desktop mentioned above. The renders can be launched with just one click from the laptop with our Blender plug-in, and downloaded when they are completed. The laptop will be available to use for anything else for one extra hour per day, and that’s 30 more hours in a month. More importantly, the farm power will be available from any place in the world that has an internet connection: train, airport, hotel, conference, etc. And it won’t require a significant upfront payment either.

2. The ‘big project’ model, which means that the artist (or studio) works on a larger animation for a longer period of time. The project will need to be rendered at various stages in its development, for corrections/previz and the final render. Let’s consider the following scenario over the same 90-day period, with several revisions of the animation (50 to 100 hours each), and the final 300 hour render at the end. This render time is encountered quite frequently in real life, for instance for a 30 seconds long commercial with 25 minutes render time per frame.

In this case, the notebook alone won’t be enough. There are 850 total rendering hours needed for the project over 90 days. And this means that the second computer would have to render for 35 days continuously, or a third of the total time allocated to the project. But more importantly, the second computer is a limited resource. It cannot provide more than 24 render-hours in a day, and this means that a 50-hours previz render will take 2 days to complete. Also, the final render that needs 300 render-hours will take 12 days to complete. Let’s say that the notebook is also used for the final render, and the combined power brings down the total render time to 7 days. That’s still one week in which both computers are occupied 24/7 with the rendering queue and cannot be used for anything else.

Let’s see how that works on RenderStreet. For the previz, either/both RenderStreet One and our regular On-demand service can be used. RenderStreet One is a best-effort option and it will offer an average performance at least comparable to the desktop machine. And if time is of the essence, any job can be moved to the On-demand service with just one click for an instant speed boost. Let’s say you need to move to the On-demand service one quarter of the previz jobs, an equivalent of 130 server-hours on the desktop machine. This means approximately 65 hours on our GPU servers (one such server has roughly the performance of 2 Titan boards), for a total between $195 and $295, depending on the plan. Those renders will finish in under two hours each on our farm.

The final render of 300 hours (on the desktop computer described above) will require 150 hours on our GPU servers, which means between $225 and $336, depending on the plan. But more importantly, the project will be delivered in under 2 hours. Compared to the 7 day alternative, that’s almost one week sooner. In visual terms, this is how the evolution of the render job will be during one day on the desktop, compared to RenderStreet.

As a basis for comparison, to achieve the same result using your own hardware you’d have to buy 75 computers having 2 Titan boards each, which would add up to approximately $225,000. Not to mention the pain of setting up all those computers to network render the project. Or the noise and the heat (approximately 2,300 BTU/hr per server).

The obvious benefit for the project is a faster turnaround, or more time available for the artist to spend on making the model and animation perfect. Or, if everything is already perfect, one week to relax between projects : )

Those are just two possible scenarios where we can make a difference. RenderStreet One has already proven to be a valuable tool for its users, and has successfully eliminated the need to buy that extra desktop in several cases. The On-demand rendering service continues to be the most flexible solution for all needs, regardless of the project size. You just need to try it out and see what solution works best for you.