Small Render Setup: 2 or 3 workstations vs 1 big server

[krysalis]

Thanks again to all. I am Maya + Houdini on Windows FWIW.

[Joelaff]

Good combination in that you can go full Linux! We’re using standalone to render on Linux whenever we need extra AWS cloud nodes with deadline. The Microsoft tax on data center nodes is ridiculous with high core counts. It’s almost 5x more expensive to run windows on their high end nodes vs Linux.

I have heard that Houdini sims multi thread better than Phoenix, but I have not seen actual benchmarks. If they do then the 79x5 thread ripper machines may always sim faster than the likes of a 7950x or 9950x. With various Max tools it is scene dependent, like I mentioned before. I prefer to sim on farm machines anyway, and use the workstation for other interactive stuff.

Interested to see how the 9950X3D performs. The 7950X3D makes very little difference in our applications. We see it to be about the same or even slower than the 7950x in our testing with render nodes, but they charged the 3d cache architecture for the new model, and it is supposed to help across the board. Those consumer chips also have much faster RAM than the thread rippers, but in vray itself that doesn’t seem to be extremely important.