Network Rendering worth setting up?

[Anonymous]

I would like to get setup for faster rendering but I am trying to determine if it's worth it in my case.

My big renders usually involve v-ray and in the future will sometimes use Phoenix FD.

My main workstation is a Threadripper 3970X with 128GB RAM and an 11GB RTX 2080ti.

I have two latops which could assist as render nodes.

i7 with 64GB RAM with 8GB Quadro

i7 with 16GB RAM with 2GB Quadro

And sometimes I might also use my other older desktop i7 64GB RAM and 3GB GTX 780.

They all run SSD and/or NVME drives if that makes a difference.

The threadripper is so much more powerful than everything else I am wondering how much benefit it would be to network the others to assist in rendering?

For example, if the Threadripper can render an animation in 50 hours, how much faster would adding the other computers make?  Significant?

[BenBisares]

I guess the TLDR would be, if you have the equipment and licenses then why not use them.

Some points to consider:

• Do your scenes regularly require more than 16GB of RAM? If yes then you can eliminate your 16GB laptop
• If not doing distributed rendering, on average how long does it take to render 1 frame? If we're talking less than a minute then perhaps it's not worth it as each frame done through network rendering has additional overhead which may cancel out the advantage of an additional render node if rendering thousands of frames
• The opposite scenario is also true in that jobs of a few frames but long render times for each frame may not make sense with a mix of very fast and slow computers
• Render nodes can be very useful though if doing something like test renders as they can take the load off your workstation and allow you to keep working

In the end it's hard to give a definitive answer on this. You would most likely have to do some small tests and extrapolate to decide.

[Anonymous]

Thank you.

The scenes I would most likely want to network render are animations that might take an hour(s) on the fast machine and many hours on the slower machines per frame, and the animaton being 100-300 frames usually.

The Threadripper seems around 8-10 times faster than the 64GB Laptop, not sure about the others.

[dgorsman]

Laptops have poor heat dissipation.   They're built for the concept of mobility rather than running flat out for extended periods of time, so you can end up having to deal with things like performance throttling to keep internal temperatures down.  You might get away with setting up a cooling pad but by that point you may as well be looking at setting up a network of cheap ($100-$200 with some upgrades) second-hand boxes, or look at online render farms.

In short: laptops not recommended for long term rendering, networked or otherwise.