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Building a Render Farm?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-task-for-that-beowulf-cluster-in-the-basement dept.

Dark Bard asks: "What is the best configuration for a rendering machine. Given the variety of chips and components what are the best options balancing cost verses speed. I've been running Lightwave and plan to shift soon to Maya. AMD chips seem to be rated as a bit faster for rendering and they cost less, as well. Given the number of types of RAM available, what are the advantages of each verses cost? Should ECC be considered? What about motherboards? Integrated video would be ideal but it would have to be adequate to run the software. Is there any advantage to running the new 64 bit processors? Should you consider dual chips? What about operating system? Lightwave won't run on Linux but Maya will. How well do the major operating systems compare when used for this purpose?"

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Reindeer Farm by MountainLogic · · Score: 5, Funny
    What a great seasonal question. The most important thing in a Reindeer Farm is plenty of snow.

    Oh, wait. Never mind.

    1. Re:Reindeer Farm by {8_8} · · Score: 2, Funny

      I imagine the most important thing in a Reindeer Farm would be the reindeer, followed by reindeer food. http://www.deerfarmer.com/ appears to have reindeer farming information, but IANARF so I have no idea how accurate the information is.

      Um, something on-topic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a render farm essentially a cluster of machines for distributed rendering? If so, then why would the video card for each node matter? Hell, the original article asks for advice on "a rendering machine", not a render farm. I don't know anything about computer animation/art, but I imagine that you could pick a rendering package and design a machine above the recommended requirements.

  2. Re:now or later by Emil+Brink · · Score: 3, Funny

    Sure it does. It's also excellent at rotating, translating, and (I'm sure) shearing. Plus, all of these transforms can be anmimated over time. ;)

    --
    main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}