Hi. I’m in no rush. Just curious, what would a power-efficient render farm at home be like? So it doesn’t use as much watts as a dryer or something lol.
It would purely be for rendering animations in either eevee or Cycles (or other renderers, especially npr or anime ones), or rendering vse, while I use my other main pc for actually using Blender.
Is it better to find a mini pc/laptop with a laptop version of an rtx 5090? (I say laptop 5090 because laptop rtx GPUs have lower vram than their desktop version).
Or just build a desktop pc, but make it perform at lower watts (is this even possible?).
This site says the laptop 5090 is among the highest performance per tdp:
Also, apparently a laptop 5090 can outperform my desktop 4070 super with 2x the vram and half the tdp lol (see links below). So then… such a laptop might end up my main pc. But should I use my current pc as the render farm? (It has a 13600k) Or would that use too many watts to be practical?
Also, should I plug both computers in separate outlets? My dad says to avoid using two high-watt devices in the same outlet at the same time. We live in Canada.
Does the cpu matter? Or can rendering be entirely done on a gpu, with only a very cheap cpu? Whenever I do viewport render with material view eevee, only the gpu is working at 100%.
Does nvme vs ssd matter
Mini pc vs laptop? Not to be confused with an itx pc since that’s just a desktop pc.
Ok. What would you recommend instead for optimal performance per power consumption? Or is it best to just get one or two pc’s with gpu’s that use a low amount of power even if they don’t render that quickly?
There’s no such thing as a power-efficient render farm, not in terms of “less watts than a dryer”. The point of a render farm is to run hot and heavy, distributing load across multiple machines, and then use virtually no power when there’s nothing in the render queue.
One computer is not a “render farm”. If you want a dedicated rendering machine, it shouldn’t be a traditional computer- it should have no peripherals or monitors, you should access it via remote login, preferably SSH. Every single pixel output to a monitor is less rendering performance. Same with background tasks, input processing- if you want the fastest render, you shouldn’t have a mouse or a trackpad, keyboard input only. You want a barebones installation stripped of every single program, service, and driver not directly related to rendering. Anything not rendering-related is a waste of power and processing power.
You need to put both computers on different breakers. Two computers drawing maximum power at one time may or may not trip your breakers, depends on how old/janky your house is, but you don’t want to find out.
Other than that, yes, what thorn said, a laptop is your worst possible choice. You want a full box with LOTS of cooling, NO monitors, the lightest OS you can find, a strong PSU, wake on LAN and SSH remote access, and no peripherals or unneeded softwares
I mean, sure, if you are going for the absolute theoretical top performance, but practically, how much difference is a mouse or even a monitor going to make?
It depends. Some tasks are done on CPU like preparing the scene for render. In case of renders that take a long time that’s negligible, but if you have many very fast rendering frames then this can take up a significant percent of render time and so the CPU may become the bottleneck.
If the renders take long time like 15-60 minutes or more and you are rendering on GPU the CPU doesn’t matter, but if you are rendering animations where the frames render in a minute or so, the CPU may become quite important.
Oh, and yeah, sure, I wouldn’t ever consider a laptop dedicated for rendering as well. They overheat, their GPU versions are weaker. Building a PC would be my choice. Mini PCs don’t sound like a good idea either. They are not designed for that and you probably want to customize it easily. If it’s one PC “render farm”(which is absolutely not a render farm like Joseph pointed out ) space is probably not going to be a huge issue.
If you are at the point where you need that kind of power to render an animation, I would like to ask: what are you planning to render that makes a 4090 not good enough? Either you are routinely rendering whole episodes of an animated show or an entire feature film or the render has really bad optimization.
I was only considering a laptop 4090 because all the laptop 40s series gpus have little vram. The 4090 itself only has 16GB vram iirc. And 3d scenery can use up a lot of vram afaik. I’m not at that skill level yet, but one time I opened a polyhaven scene, and it was very very slow, probably due to not enough vram.
I guess I was going about this wrong. Thanks for the info.
Does this mean I can improve my renders on my current pc by turning off my monitors? I only ask because this is the one thing I can try immediately.
I dunno how related this is, but one time I tried rendering in the terminal on Ubuntu, but didn’t know how. There might have only been a tutorial for Windows. Looks like there’s a linux tutorial now. Maybe I’ll try that again.
I’ll also add, just for FYI: Eevee cannot use multiple video cards - so, you’ll need one machine for each vid card, if you plan to render with Eevee.
PS: Flow was rendered on a single PC, so a render farm isn’t always a requirement for long-form video.
And personally, the last time I was using a render farm - it took 3-10 mins per frame to render. Now it takes about 5 seconds or less for a frame, so rendering is a sort of non-issue. Especially since i started using Psoft instead of Grease Pencil.
Command line rendering should be able to do it. The speed difference is very small, the main advantage is for stability (and possibly memory if you are close to filling your vram).
While that’s true, there are many ways to limit the memory use. I find that lots of scenes I open from other artists are not built with care on this aspect. Tiny background objects with heavy subdivision, textures with way higher resolution than needed, objects that could be instanced that aren’t.
If you know to be careful about your ressources, there are ways to fit almost any scene into 16GB. I’m on an older GPU with much less vram than that and I could fit most scenes on it with a bit of optimization.
It is a question that is understood as building an optimal rendering environment for situations where power use is limited.
For laptops, you can refer to the maximum power consumption indicated on the product.
For Desktop PCs, you can calculate the maximum power consumption for each part.
There are websites that help you with these calculations.
If it is used only for rendering, a desktop would be good based on its durability or performance.
For GPUs with the highest power consumption, you can choose a model that consumes a lot of VRAM but consumes less power.
The power consumption of the GPU depends on the model.
Nvidia
RTX5090 : 600W l RTX3090ti : 450~500W l RTX 4090 : 450W l RTX5080 : 380W
RTX 3090 : 350W l RTX5070ti : 350W l RTX 3080Ti : 350W l RTX 3080 : 320W l RTX 4080 : 320W
RTX 3070Ti : 290W l RTX 4070Ti S : 285W l RTX 4070Ti : 285W l TITAN RTX : 280W
RTX2080ti : 260W
RTX5070 : 250W l RTX2080S : 250W l RTX 2080 : 230W l RTX 3070 : 220W l RTX 4070S : 220W
RTX 4070 : 200W l RTX 2070S : 215W l RTX 2070 : 215W l RTX 3060Ti : 180W l RTX2060S : 175W
RTX 2060 : 175W l RTX 3060 : 170W l RTX5060 : 160W l RTX 4060Ti : 160W l RTX 4060 : 115W
Sure, but what does a person cost to do the optimisation? You buy a card once and then it lasts two years. And you need some kind of card anyways
For optimisation you pay for every single project either some other person in money or yourself in time.
If you have enough time to spare then it might be cheaper but otherwise depending on your location in a lot of scenarios hardware is cheaper.
No. You’ll use less total power, since the monitor isn’t on, but it won’t make any difference to the render time.
The ideal setup that Joseph is talking about is where the GPU that is being used for rendering, isn’t also the GPU that is used for desktop display, since that splits it’s processing (granted not by a huge amount usually) and uses up the VRAM (depending on desktop resolution, etc around 1GB VRAM could be lost just to the OS UI).
For a render node (that does nothing else), there’s usually two solutions to maximise the GPU.
Don’t even install a desktop GUI, everything is run,setup,managed by the command line. Easy to do with say Linux (not installing/running a GUI, maybe much harder managing the system).
Use two GPU’s, one configured for the GUI (much lower spec, or even ideally a basic iGPU) and one full main GPU, which is selected just for rendering. If one is going to use Windows, then this is mostly the only option, very hard to install and use Windows, without the desktop GUI.
As for the whole overall render farm at home, there’s so many factors to consider. How much space you have for the hardware, how fast do you need the output (actual set deadlines or done when its done).
Then there’s the question of CPU vs GPU rendering. GPU is way faster, as long as it all fits in VRAM, the moment it doesn’t, you are in trouble.
This then also leads to ‘power efficient’ rendering and in many ways, that’s harder to find out about. It’s largely a given that GPU’s will be better, since while they tend to use more power, they also render way faster.
But without testing them all yourself or finding some benchmarks that do, it’s not so easy to know if say a 5060Ti (while slower) isn’t more power efficient then say a 4090.
Yes the 4090 will render it sooner, but will use more power doing so, hence it may not be as efficient.
Yeah, I agree; when I was using Linux, I had a GTX 1070 for the UI and RTX 2080Ti for rendering. That worked really well.
Another thing to consider is what to do with the heat output of your rendering rig. In summer here, you end up paying for the electricity twice: once to create the render (and heat!) and then again to pump the heat outside (via air conditioner). Oof!
Keep in mind though if you’re rendering with eevee, that last time I checked it didn’t worked unless you have a desktop running ( to make things simple).
Basically I had to run my renderfarm client in the desktop and not as a linux service to have eevee working.
Well unless you have roughly the same rendering power on both computers it’s going to be a bit clunky.
Basically you want your computer A to be the fastest because it’s the one you’re working with.At some point the computer B is going to be slow (for 3D renders) and it would be better to go eat something and let computer A render the thing.
Or you’ll make heavy scenes on computer A that won’t render well on B.
Anyway, playing with renderfarm is fun but at home I don’t find it really worth it … but it can be fun depending on what you like in life
Yeah run a lightweight desktop like XFCE if using Linux.
I bet the most likely home use-case for a separate render computer is that it frees up your workstation for working on the next scene while the previous one is rendering on the other computer. But yeah, like you said, it’s necessary to make Sure the scene will fit on the render computer.
Yeah, fair enough, I was mostly thinking of Cycles, since lets face it, Eevee is meant to be ‘real-time’, so in theory not a huge gain in doing the rendering on other computers. I mean overall, unless one was constantly rendering very big and very long scenes (or had multiple people making stuff all at once, so there was a list of render jobs to be done), then having a farm isn’t likely to be of much use.
At this stage I personally just have the need, so far all my renders are either single test images or short little test animations. The images take at most 20s and the animation maybe 30-60mins, so I render those while eating dinner.
Having said that, with my upgrades over the years, I do now have 1-2 ‘spare’ PC’s, so if/when the need arises, about all I’m lacking is another fairly good GPU.
I mean I have my old GTX 1070 Ti in one PC, but even if the render fits in the 8GB, it’s just largely not worth it. My RTX 3080 Ti is just Soooo much faster, that especially from a ‘power efficient’ point of view, I’m better off just waiting a little longer for the 3080 Ti to get the job done.
Maybe just best to only render during Winter I know it’s a great way to help warm up a room.
) space is probably not going to be a huge issue.
