When you need additional render power to finish your project on time UltraRender is here to help. As you know we offer different pre configured servers for remote rental but also can prepare custom units.
When the budget is tight you need to be sure what is needed and what is only an extra. Below you can find few thoughts that can be helpful either if you decide to rent a server or think of upgrading your local workstation.
Based on our experience with quite a few GPU renderers we can point few basic “rules” for basic hardware components and its influence on GPU rendering. Lets not focus here on GPUs as this seems quite clear – faster GPU means faster rendering, more vRAM means bigger scenes served.
CPU
- number of physical cores should be at least +2 greater than number of GPUs installed (if you use 2 GPUs use CPU with 4+ physical cores)
- base clock speed of CPU is more important than number of CPU cores if the above number is met
- base clock speed of CPU increases its importance for projects where average render time per frame is less than a minute (on a workstation you use), it gets even more important if render time is few seconds
- base clock speed is on general very important when there is almost constant data re-loading to GPUs (scenes with fast render times, assignment of one task per GPU where multi GPU systems are used etc.)
RAM
- minimum amount should be greater than combined amount of vRAM of all your GPUs, best option is to have it 2+ times greater
- amount of RAM is most important for heavy scenes that use out of core rendering
- small amount of RAM can be an obstacle for memory consuming processes as batch rendering (for example with Autodesk Maya) – caching of data on ssd or even NVMe disk is still slower than using RAM only
Disk
- NVMe disks are great improvement in overall performance of PCs – that is a fact
- however if your project does not use disk’s cache greatly, in other words does not consume paging file but “fits into” RAM you most probably will not see any difference here (in terms of render speeds) when using SSD or NVMe disks
- NVMe disk’s great read / write speeds gives a boost to render time speeds to every project that uses lots of paging file
The above are just some tips that we find helpful. Please do not treat it as a guide. But if you would like to share your thoughts or ask anything please do not hesitate to contact us via e-mail.