Renderfarm with Intel & AMD's

[BBullo]

Let me ask a "stoopid" question here.

I heard form a FR "freind" that when building a renderfarm you have to go with all Intels or all AMD's. If not the two processors render scenes/buckets slightly differently. Is that an issue with Vray?

right now my office has all Intels, but I wanted to mix in some AMD's.

[Dynedain]

Theoretically (and it happened moreso in the past than with recent generations of chips) because of differing floating point operations and random number generators, you could have differences in procedural textures that involved random generation.

However, I have never ever seen it, and I've been running a mixed farm for several years now.

[TRGraphics]

I have a mix in my farm, and there is no problem that I can see.

Tony

[BBullo]

That's good to know, thanks for the quick response.
After following Percy's thread on benchmarking, its tempting to look into the X2's, I just don't know if I have the time or patience to figure out the overclocking.

[percydaman]

since I only did some real simple overclocking, it really wasn't too bad. I used a utility that came with my motherboard to determine what cpu multiplier was stable, then just rebooted into BIOS and made the changes. easy as pie!

[jow]

do it you wont be disappointed!!

[jacksc02]

percy, what was that overclocking app you used?

[percydaman]

its called uGURU i think...came with my Abit mobo.... which is cool so its specifically designed for my mobo...

[meanadam]

X2! X2!

Can't beat it for the money.
No probs here.

[DaForce]

I must say i have never witnessed such a surge of CPU buying quite like what happened when the X2 came out.

They really are great arnt they

[TRGraphics]

The x2's are really the first chips that are exactly what we needed and for a fair price. I'm a happy camper

Now, max and vray 64bit is all thats left to really make everything come together for us. I can't wait!!!!!

Tony

[andrius]

I have p3's, p4's, Xeons and Opetrons in my farm.

No problems at all.

[Syclone1]

Yea my farm has AMD and Intel Critters in it also and so far so good for the last few years.

-dave

[Da_elf]

all ive got is a dual xeon, a dual amd2600+MP and a dual 64bit opteron and all 3 play nice together

[Mirko]

We indeed had some problems with our mixed renderfarm. We have some older Athlons, P4 and a XEON. In the past we had some trouble with flickering shadows and different brightness.

Most of those issues have been detected while rendering with max scanline renderer. But I think we even had some trouble with vray.
We then decided to group our PCs in the Render Qeue. So we have a group of Intels and a group of AMDs. We can direct different scenes to different groups.

If I had to build up a render farm today I would make a decision between Intel and AMD at first and then build up the whole thing with CPUs of just one of both companies.