I have a Ryzen 7 1700 PC, and something weird happened that has me wondering if there are any VRay functions that Ryzens do much faster than Xeon chips.
A test scene I have right now takes about 30 seconds per frame on my system. With 900 frames, and a Cinebench score of 1379, the scene should have cost only 7 Euros to render on Ranch Computing’s farm -which is loaded with Dual Xeon E5-2697A V4s. But twice the job ended up costing ten times that, and the frames were averaging 1:17.
I’m not aware of anything specifically that Ryzen CPUs do very much better, except that they have less cores but at higher frequencies. You can get us a scene so that we can test it here on similar hardware, and maybe then we can contact Ranch Computing and ask them to look into it.
Last time we used a render farm that wasn’t amazon ec2, we ran a test frame and got a time of about 30 minutes. then we send the whole scene over that was 5gb and pulled massive textures, and got some wildly inconsistent times varying from an hour to 3 hours. very awkward and difficult experience. that’s not the only time thats happened too. I can only assume most people who run render farms dont have the network bandwidth to cope with the number of machines they are running.
We have a permanent ec2 now and it’s the best.
@Neilg Many times it is not due to slow network bandwidth but a less responsive storage. Network is cheap nowadays hence it wouldn’t be something that people don’t want to invest in. Our render farm did suffer from file loading time before we switched from scale-up storage to scale-out type. Scale-out storage is the way to go.
How’s ec2? I tried it once and feel the fee is very unexpected, probably I do not really understand their calculator well enough. I’ve our render farm deployed on Azure now and it works pretty well. The cost estimation is much more accurate to me. I can spin up 500+ cores with my account but still gonna be very careful with the cost.
@YoyoBoy We tested your scene on a couple of different machines here and these are the times we got.
Generally it was slower later in the sequence, where the camera is zoomed in at the object with the glossy reflection, but we didn’t even hit as much as 1 minute/frame.
Xeon е5-2699 v4 start of the sequence was at ~1.5s/frame and later on → ~13s/frame
Xeon L5520 start at ~20s/frame; later ~32s/frame
Xeon E5520 start at ~22s/frame; later ~35s/frame
Core i7 start at ~7s/frame; later ~44s/frame
Ryzen 7 1800X ~6-7s/frame