Help - Sloooow network render with Vray 1.05

[konrad72]

Hello Everyone

I'm new to this forum and I need some help/advice regarding network rendering.

A few days ago I set up my two laptops to do a network render with Vray 1.05 - I used a crossover cable in that instance to set up the network. My main laptop has a 2.7ghz quadcore i7 processor whilst the other laptop had a 2.2ghz quadcore i7 processor. After the setup was done, I tested the network render and it worked. Both of my laptops could be seen in the render preview window (they seemed to work fine) NEVERTHELESS after a few comparison tests it turned out that the rendering was SLOWER with two laptops rather than a single laptop PC.

One would think that a rendering should take less time in such a setup, but it did not - it made me wonder what is the point of setting up for network rendering if the rendering time is longer? Perhaps I'm doing something wrong and would appreciate it if someone could either explain it to me or provide a link to a tutorial/discussion thread which explains how to do this correctly in detail.

Right now I do have a network router available so perhaps I can utilize this as opposed to using a crossover cable. Either way, I would appreciate any advice especially if you had the issue of slow network rendering and resolved it.

[fooprobe]

How long did the rendering take? It takes 15-30secs for Vray to talk to the other machine(s) and manage the render process. If you have short renders then DR might not be useful. If its a longer render that's taking longer, can you post the stats and the files?

[konrad72]

It was a long time render. The non-DR rendering on the main machine took 20min5sec to complete. The DR rendering took 20min20sec to complete (15 seconds longer than non-DR rendering on a 20+ minute rendering).

My guess is that there had to be a major slowdown in communication between computers - maybe texture loading took too long??? Perhaps setting up a network by using a router (as opposed to crossover cable) would be better.

I don't know a this moment and I've disconnected the crossover cable because it prevented me from accessing the internet. I can't post the file but what "stats" would you like to see?

[fooprobe]

That's all I was wondering - speed with and without DR.

hm, it's odd I agree. Not sure if the crossover cable would pose an issue, I've only done DR using a regular LAN with switch. Is your light cache set very high? I believe LC doesn't use DR. But even so it's odd.