Advice on upgrading for rendering.

#1

Ok first off I want to say I’m not an expert when it comes to render farms or any hardware configurations.

I work on a Mac and don’t want to go back to using a PC. My Mac pro is now 5 years old and although it can still chug through renders at a reasonable speed (It’s an 8 core 2.93) I’m getting work now on deadlines that it can’t match.
I’m using Arnold as my renderer and I love it so again don’t want to change. I only have one license and at the moment can’t afford another.

So I now need some advice on the best way of getting faster renders in the cheapest and most practical way. My budget is between £3000 and £4000

Option A is to upgrade my existing Mac pro to 12 core 3.4 ghz for around £1800.
Option B is to upgrade to a new Mac pro; but to be honest for the money I wouldn’t be able to get something as fast as option A.
Option C is to get a render farm or server.

I’m starting to lean towards C as it seems to offer some good solutions. One is that I can still work on my other computer while something is rendering. Although with only one license I’m guessing I couldn’t render on the second computer?
It also allows me to get more processing power for my money.
The down side to C is that I know nothing about setting up render farms and if they’re easy to maintain.
For the budget mentioned above what would your advice be on getting a separate render machine be or if I should stick with A or B?

Also wondering if people would advice on going for something like the new 18 core V3 in a separate machine?

Thanks in advance,

Peter

#2

You are facing a big problem, not because of the price of a small farm but because Arnold charge the full price for both workstation and render nodes license(1000€/1300$/850£).
Vrayforc4d for example give 10 free node license so you can basically go for a few cheap i7 slaves, and have tons of render power for a fraction of the price of a multi CPU Xeon machine. Vray for Maya charge for nodes license but the price it’s still affordable, so some i7 slaves can always be a viable option.
With Arnold pricing you are forced to pay a lot for the licenses so it’s better to go for just one powerful(pricey) node instead on many cheaper machine.
If you really need fast render IMO you have only a few alternatives, switch to a single powerful PC machine like 2x Xeon 2690v2(no OSX but 2800 points in Cinebench15), buy a 6core nMP+ a single i7 5690k slave(combined 2700 points) or just add a single 5960k to your actual machine(save your money, don’t waste it upgrading such an old workstation). Even a single 18core CPU will likely exceed your budget so is not really the best option IMO. If you can change your renderer you can save on licenses and buy more machines, for example with Vrayforc4d I’m using 4x 4930k slaves(4500 points for just 4000€).
Consider that despite being just average render machine the nMP are very good for work, much better than old models, this more than rendering power will give you a big boost in productivity.

#3

Thanks Sirio,

I know that Arnold charge for each computer but I didn’t know if it was easy to just switch between the two computers. I know you can tell Arnold who you want to allow to use the license so I thought while I was working on something I could switch the license to the server and have the powerful processors do the work.

If it really is going to be a pain it sounds like my best bet is to got for the £1800 upgrade that gives around 32,000 geekbench score.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

#4

If you can just use your license on the slaves when rendering then it’s better to go for an external node. You can get more power for the same money if you buy a 5960k(faster than a dual 3.46 12core and cheaper too). This way you can render faster on the slave and still be able to work on your main workstation. In the future consider to upgrade your workstation too, I’ve used old macpros for years and today they are very limiting for most tasks;)

#5

When you say the 5960k is faster than the dual 12 core do you mean having dual 5960k as on it’s own it’s an 8 core and I can’t see how that would be faster?

In regards to the older mac pros. I’ve upgraded my mine so it has a fast GPU and 64 gigs of ram. I don’t find it limiting other than rendering. In what other ways do you find them limited?

#6

I mean faster than a dual 6core 3.46(the best CPU you can fit on your old macpro).
The problem with the classic mp is the old architecture, much slower single thread performance, slow interfaces. Also the GPU is very limited by the CPU performance, you can put whatever GPU you want inside but it will be always limited in performance compared to newer machine. Of course if you just work with simple scene you can easily continue to use your mp for many years. My old mac pros worked fine for me for many years but I usually work with very big file and the old machine slowly become unusable lately, they have not the power to handle large scenes easily. Yes the new machine “lack” render power comparing with modern dual CPU machines but beside that it’s a very good workstation, stupid fast SSD, good GPUs, almost the best single thread performance you can get from a Xeon. I’ve recorded a video on youtube, there’s no way old mac can handle scene like that smootly no matter what upgrade you will put inside:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfRn1fAreVM

#7

Thanks for the information, definitely worth thinking about.

#8

I didn’t realize vray for c4d is offering 10 free render node licenses. They now charge for each license for all the other software. I’d guess it probably won’t be long for c4d to follow suite

#9

If and when they will change price policy like Chaosgroup, upgrading from Vray 2.xx core to 3.0 + 10 node licenses cost just 970$:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/UpgradeCalculator.html
Seems very fair if you consider that since the first release(6 years ago?) I’ve paied Vrayforc4d just once and have upgrade to 2.55 core for free.
Even if you consider the price for a new license for Max/Maya +5 nodes the price it’s just 2000$, about a third of the price of an equivalent Arnold based solution where you have to pay full license price for each node. That’s the main reason why I’ll never touch Arnold when available for Cinema, I like the software very much and I’m happy another great renderer have been added to our platform but the nodes price seems simply absurd when you consider what the competitor are offering.