We are planning on buying a machine to start our render farm. I have a few questions maybe someone can help me with
1. Now that Vray has hybrid rendering we are planning on getting a machine with these specs. Is this a decent render farm machine?
1 x Xeon E5-2680V4 / 2.4 GHZ 35 MB CACHE, 14 CORE
RAM 32MB
SSD 512 GB - HP Z TURBO DRIVE
NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI VIDEO CARD (for GPU Rendering)
2. Will Vray auto detect that this machine has a GPU card installed and is part of the render farm? Once you set them up?
3. When you select hybrid rendering as you preferred method and submit a rendering thru backburner will it take advantage of both CPU/GPU automatically? Or is there something else that you need to do?
4. also doing distributed rendering with Vray, will Vray use use both CPU/GPU if hybrid rendering is selected on all the machines that are taking part?
1. This is a very good processor. Check the V-Ray Benchmark | Chaos to get an idea of the performance.
2. Hybrid rendering works only with V-Ray GPU. Check supported features here https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/…orted+Features. You will have to choose V-Ray RT CUDA and enable the C++/CPU device from the list of devices in 3ds Max.
3. You have to enable the C++/CPU device from the “Select Devices for V-Ray GPU rendering” app (ocldeviceselect.exe) - it comes with every V-Ray installation. The C++/CPU (Hybrid) rendering is new and is available as opt-in feature. This is all you have to do.
4. Yes, if the C++/CPU device checkbox is ticked and you use the RT render slave option, all CPUs and GPUs will be used.
Keep in mind that the hybrid rendering is V-Ray RT CUDA feature (it basically makes the CPU behaving like a regular CUDA device), not V-Ray Adv. Check the supported features first.
Somewhat on the same topic: aside from some unsupported features, is there any downside to CUDA on the CPU? Does it render at the same speed as the Adv production renderer?
CUDA on CPU is completely different code base compared to Adv. It will render with different speed compared to Adv, but the performance of both should be comparable.