[SOLVED] Planning a render farm

[scallumal]

Hi guys
Im thinking of making a budget render farm for premiere pro 3dsmax and other film applications
Would it be better to get multiple gpus? Or is cpu rendering enough?
I have a system that i am currently using
Which has a 3600 and rx5700 with 16gb ram
So im just wondering what would be a better farm cpu or gpu

 

[Obakasama]

When I see 'render farm' I think of a set up with multiple graphics cards, because I'm not aware of a set up which can utilise multiple CPUs. In the old Blenchmark results there were results for six GTX 750tis, if memory serves. Depending on 3DSMax and other software, as long as they can use multiple graphics cards then it makes sense to go multiple GPUs.

 

[scallumal]

L

When I see 'render farm' I think of a set up with multiple graphics cards, because I'm not aware of a set up which can utilise multiple CPUs. In the old Blenchmark results there were results for six GTX 750tis, if memory serves. Depending on 3DSMax and other software, as long as they can use multiple graphics cards then it makes sense to go multiple GPUs.

Okay what sort of gpus do you think would be best?

 

[Obakasama]

The boring answer would be whichever the software can take advantage of the hardware the most. So the ideal scenario would be whichever gives the best performance, which typically means the most expensive option.

However, this ignores any sort of budget consideration and how well the workload may scale with multiple graphics cards. To give you an idea of what I have in mind: http://blenchmark.com/gpu-benchmarks
Blenchmark hasn't been updated for a few years now, but when it was reliable it gives a certain insight into how Blender works. Notice that the scaling for multiple graphics cards isn't perfectly linear, eg. the GTX 1070 results. I'm sure other rendering software will have users performing similar testing, though I'm not familiar with those.

Once you start considering budget, then finding the best balance of price to performance becomes the aim. Assuming the Blenchmark results are accurate, two GTX 1050 tis outperform a GTX 1080 ti in Blender at the time.