January 31, 2021 iRendercs

The best choice of cloud render farm for Blender with Redshift

Redshift is known in the graphics industry as one of the leading GPU rendering tools – its Biased Rendering platform is much more flexible than zero-false options. others (Unbiased Rendering). Redshift is also famous for producing sharp animations when running on a variety of servers.  In November 2020, Redshift is the latest name in a growing list of “industry-standard” renderers to join the roster of render engines with official blender support. Its latest 3.0.33 release brings with it the first public beta release of its long-awaited Blender plugin among a host of new features.

Graphics card- based render engines such as Redshift, Rhino, Octane, or VRAY have matured quite a bit and are overtaking CPU-based Render-Engines in popularity. As we all know Redshift is one of the renderers that takes advantage of the performance of a plenty of GPUs power. But first, you will need a well-rounded and optimized solution that is capable of supporting all these GPUs. With this in mind, iRender will help you explore the hardware giving the best-bang-for-the-buck?

Recommended hardware configuration

1. Which processors should you choose?

When selecting a processor for your application, usually the two key factors to consider are frequency and the number of cores the processor has. With this in mind, an Intel Dual Xeon or Intel Core i9 solution will be the suitable processors to meet your CPU requirements. However, you must be careful as this Intel Core i9 does not have the capabilities to support more than 2x graphics cards at full speed on its own. This fact leads to the solid choice, Dual Xeon, if you are using Redshift. The two processors working together generally provide plenty of expandability capable of supporting multiple graphics cards.

The entire machine of iRender is equipped with CPU Dual Intel Xeon E5 2678 v3 belonging to socket 2011-3 and owning 24 cores 48 threads thanks to Hyper Threading technology. The basic clock speed is from 2.4Ghz and Turbo Boost up is 3.3Ghz (clock speed of all cores is 3.0 Ghz). The L3 cache is 30Mb, combined with the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) feature that allows operation on systems that support multi-socket with high bandwidth. Therefore, when running Dual CPU Xeon E5 2678 v3 on a main chip set, it will increase the maximum performance especially for those who specialize in rendering.

In the case of Redshift, there is also a third factor that also has a great impact on the rendering process: The number of PCIe lanes your processor can support. PCIe lanes will directly affect the amount of graphics cards you can put in your system. CPUs with a high number of PCIe-Lanes usually fall into the HEDT (High- End-Desk-Top) platform range and are often great for CPU Rendering as well, as they tend to have more cores and, therefore, higher multi-core performance. GPUs are connected to the CPU via PCIe-Lanes on the motherboard. Top-tier GPUs usually need 16x PCIe 3.0 Lanes to run at full performance without bandwidth throttling. And Intel Xeon E5 2678 v3 of iRender  possesses PCI Express 3.0 with 40 lanes.

2. How many GB RAM will be suitable?

16GB and 32GB RAM is respectively considered optimal to use Redshift and Blender on the official website of the manufacturer. However, in fact, Blender does a little bit of everything, and it isn’t optimized for narrow performance conditions like other modeling tools. That is the reason why Blender needs more RAM than other programs. As the RAM caching system repeatedly re-caches objects for each active modifier, it has a great impact on Blender’s modifier stack. It has a similar impact on sculpting, too, due to the differences between the sculpting and modeling mesh data structures.

If you’re using Redshift, even for low-poly or simple scenes, you will need at least 16-32GB of RAM for your PC to work well. If you tend to multitask and this is not your first workstation build, more than 64GB will help you limit data loss and improve Redshift’s stability. That’s also the reason iRender provides our customers 128 – 256GB RAM memory to help hold data of multiple programs running in parallel, so multitasking (running multiple apps at the same time) is smoother and more quickly. We understand the actual needs of the artist, we understand that a modern 3D artist needs to be more creative than just a software.

3. Which storage drive should you get?

The highest performance drives available today are NVMe based Solid State Drives (SSDs), and these are generally all we recommend for primary drives. SSD’s ensure your system will boot as quickly as possible, keeps your system as responsive as possible, and reduces your application/project loading times.

While many other famous render farms (for example: Fox Render Farm) also use HDD storage, iRender strongly invests in NVme SSD for the entire render farm despite the expensive cost. We define new era rendering in parallel with fast speed.

4. Which graphics cards are best for Redshift?

Once you have a system configuration in mind with strong foundations, you can now consider GPU configurations to get the most out of your application and budget. Redshift is only compatible with NVIDIA CUDA. So, it’s a pity for those who are AMD fans because it will not work on them. As a general rule of thumb, more graphics cards are better performing than a single high-end card for GPU rendering. At the time of writing this article, +8GB VRAM is recommended for optimal rendering performance by Redshift. Now the next question is whether NVIDIA Quadro or NVIDIA Geforce Graphics is better for Redshift?

Both of these solutions should work fine for Redshift. If Redshift is your primary application, then we recommend using NVIDIA Geforce graphics cards as they generally have higher performance at a lower cost. Specifically, some Quadro GPUs offer even more VRAM but their value is worse for GPU rendering compared to mainstream or “Gaming” GPUs. The best NVIDIA GPUs for Rendering are:

Source: Complete Redshift Benchmark Results List

What you can get from iRender Farm?

1. The most powerful configuration for Blender with Redshift render

In other popular render farms, the rendering process will depend on the project distribution on render farm through Farm Manager – the supplier’s farm management tool. That means you don’t have the ability to choose the optimal PC configuration you want for Blender and Redshift. 

But at iRender, we provide their customers with an extremely unique rendering solution. We offer a specific Multi-GPUs server for designers with a passion for Redshift, Blender, Octane, …with different configuration options depending on your usage needs. In addition to the hardware powerful enough for the rendering process that mentioned above, iRender is always up to date with the latest card models from NVIDIA like RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3090 with VRAM from 10GB to 24GB totally satisfying for software that utilizes the power from multi-cards. They are also integrated with NVlink technology to expand data bandwidth between GPU and CPU 5-12 times faster than PCI Express interface. It can be used as a large memory pool for the GPU to display large and complex scenes.  With iRender: technology must be the latest.

Let’s take a look at Redshift benchmark table when rendering in iRender’s 6 cards packages:

2. Free redshift license for Prime customers

The cost for the Redshift License is $500. However, for maximum support to deliver the smoothest rendering experience possible with Redshift on our servers, iRender is ready to offer a Redshift license to Prime customers. Users who top up enough points to become Prime customers will be able to use the Redshift license without usage or maintenance costs. Our opinion is that the customer experience comes first.

3. The only render farm provides fixed rental package

Normally, the cost is calculated according to the actual time you use the machine: from the time you connect our server to the moment the computer is shut down.  But you can always save up to 60% with our Fixed Rental feature. For those who are in need of a server more than a day, or have extremely large projects, we advise to choose a daily/ weekly/monthly rental package. The discount is attractive (30% for daily packages, 50% for weekly, and 60% for monthly packages) and you can leave the device idle, it still won’t be charged extra.  iRender – efficient render – competitive cost.

4. Real human support 24/7

Whether you are an iRender customer, or you are simply interested in our service, iRender has a great number of enthusiastic staff that are always ready to support you 24/7. Whenever you have trouble using our server, or even with your software, we -iRender Support Team are always there to help you solve your problem. We believe the quality of support we provide is as vital as the technology we deliver. We provide unmatched support tailored to your specific needs and goals. What Redshift users can get from iRender is not only the best quality products but also the high security and the most comfortable render time.

Final thought

We hope this overview has shown you some information to utilize a GPU renderer like Redshift in the cloud. At iRender, we try our best everyday to offer the best thing to our beloved customers, what a 3D artist deserves, what an artwork deserves. What you get is more than rendering to create the final product. You receive a new technology solution, a good service, high security, features and softwares, and other utilities to help you save costs and time, reduce stress while working and most importantly, it breaks the creative limits of many technology ‘artists’ nowaday. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach us via Whatsapp: (84) 981-868-890. We will be ready to help you in any way!

Become a member of the iRender community today to stop wasting pointless hours of rendering. Always at the forefront of cutting-edge graphics technology, we do the rendering, the creativity is yours!

Thank you & Happy Rendering!

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