distributed rendering bandwith

[super gnu]

... was wondering how much of an effect network bandwith has on distributed rendering speed? if i were to connect my 2 workstations with dual gigabit interconnects, would it render much faster than over a standard network connection?

[davexl23]

I doubt it. Correct me if I am wrong, but the bottleneck is still the CPU, not the network. Compared to say - distributed rendering of a compositing program, which is moving a lot of data that needs only a little bit of CPU time, I think VRAY would be mostly minor data flow with a LOT of CPU crunching to generate it.

[DaForce]

The only real speed difference that you would notice is if you were rendering large scenes and your current network was too slow to transfer these scenes to the slaves quickly, this would cause the slaves to have to wait for rendering, it would not make the rendering itself any slower it would just make the overall time slower.

So if you do render lots of large scenes with lots of high res textures, then gigabyte ethernet might help move files around quick but that is all. Render speed is still controled by the CPU mainly.

[super gnu]

thanx a lot...that pretty much answers my question

[Nameless]

im new here yet this was something i was wondering to and i dont have a clear answer. nobody happen to have checked the network packets?
i'm thinking about using multiple systems over a VPN. both sides got 80kb/s up so after sending a scene it should go rather fast i think yet i dont know how big the transferspeed is in the meantime.

so anyone with some concrete numbers?

[DaForce]

hmmm im not sure what you mean. Can you rephrase it....like what exactly do you want to know.

80kb/s is ok, but a max file...for example a 100mb file would take 15-20mins to send to each machine. Which although along time once its on the machines it would be then just rendering normally. Unless of course it need to resend the scene. ...is that what you meant??

Cheers

[Randy]

@nameless, 80kb up might be fast for a small scene, but what about scenes larger than 100mb? try to use the "compress on save" in max, that way you can cut down the bandwidth used for the filetransfer, I guess the communication while rendering between servers and manager should be fast with 80kb. Just try it and use the windows performance tool to check the tranfered packets.