Rendering price vs performance what's the happy medium

[User #1751331]

So recently i was watching a number of youtube video regarding cheap server and work station GPUs and MBs from aliexpress along with cheap ddr3 ecc memory one can find.

It got me thinking about GPU prices and where the happy medium is when it comes to price and performance of GPUs
I'm going to warn you this isn't going to hold true for everyone and its going to differ based on your experience contacts and other stuff.

So which is better build one expensive system or put together a render farm and make use of less costly hardware.
When it comes to GPUs there seems to always be a point at which the value of the GPU starts exceeding the amount of work it can produces especially when you move toward more bleeding edge and newer hardware. Right now I can find GPU cards in the $150 price range that get about 1/4 to 1/3 or more performance of the rtx2080 ti which costs $1000+ . That 1000 being the low end of those prices. So even if we take the worst case of 1/4 performance for that price I can by 6 GPUs. There are ways to get those all in one system. People do it for GPU mining. If it will work for rendering applications I haven't tried. So I won't speculate. However, we can put them in a bunch of cheap systems.

There are a number of ways of acquiring the cheap systems. You could go the Aliexpress way or you could look for a refurbisher and by the systems in bulk from them and try and get a discount. They also tend to sell units in various grades such as A,B,C. C tends to have mostly cosmetic defects but still function. To me that's a no-brainer I don't give two shits what they look like just they work.

In short with a bit of haggling and using contacts I have I can for around the same price I would pay for a 32 core system with an RTX 2080ti in it I can put nearly 10 systems together with about 1/3 the performance each.

There are draw backs to it though. Space, noise, power, and having to set the sense up for a batch processing or tasking them individually to a machine...

There is an additional bonus for it though as well. Each of those systems can be upgraded in the future thus increasing performance further.
I noticed several youtubers who have small render farms.
So I am curious has anyone else looked at that aspect and what success you've had.

 

[polywog]

 

[thecardinal]

Just do what's best for you and your wallet. If you can afford the best, go for it. But the best GPUs at your disposal won't replace skill and knowledge. I got a GTX 1050, and no one renders in Daz faster than me.

 

[Domiek]

Depending on what your current setup is, the fastest way to drastically increase rendering speed is to switch render engines from Iray to Octane. Octane has a free tier for Daz limited to 1 gpu, $30 subscription for 2, and a full $600 license for more than that. If I had a choice between having 1 GPU + Octane or 2 GPU's + Iray, I'd take Octane in a heartbeat.

Even if you do find a solution for say 6 GPU's, where are you rendering from? If it's a bedroom in your house and you're located in the US, you're probably going to need to hire an electrician and drop a couple of grand. I have 4 GPU's and once tried vacuuming my office while rendering an animation, the circuit overloaded and killed all power to the office.

As far as GPU goes, a used 1080 ti is still probably the best bang for buck (Depending on where you live and local prices). Around here, I still see a few listed for $500. It's almost identical performance to a 2080 while being much cheaper and having an additional 3GB of memory. Unfortunately, no ray tracing so depending on your application the cost/performance may change.

 

[recreation]

You have a lot of options if you don't need to use iRay, because you're not bound to nvidias overprized cards.

 

[User #1751331]

Depending on what your current setup is, the fastest way to drastically increase rendering speed is to switch render engines from Iray to Octane. Octane has a free tier for Daz limited to 1 gpu, $30 subscription for 2, and a full $600 license for more than that. If I had a choice between having 1 GPU + Octane or 2 GPU's + Iray, I'd take Octane in a heartbeat.

Even if you do find a solution for say 6 GPU's, where are you rendering from? If it's a bedroom in your house and you're located in the US, you're probably going to need to hire an electrician and drop a couple of grand. I have 4 GPU's and once tried vacuuming my office while rendering an animation, the circuit overloaded and killed all power to the office.

As far as GPU goes, a used 1080 ti is still probably the best bang for buck (Depending on where you live and local prices). Around here, I still see a few listed for $500. It's almost identical performance to a 2080 while being much cheaper and having an additional 3GB of memory. Unfortunately, no ray tracing so depending on your application the cost/performance may change.

Octane comes with pretty impressive results and performance out the gate. In some areas does better than other renders and at a not so unreasonable cost depending on how you look at it. That said I have a feeling cycles is bound to improve and match it in time. There are already variants that perform quite a bit better.

You do have a good point on the electrical. That will be an issue for most people. But even so most places if you know electrical to a well enough level you can do most the work yourself and pay someone to do the inspection and sign off for you for a fraction of the price. Not advisable for most people. You need to know the code and wire ratings and a lot more. But yes you have to be mindful of the local laws different towns and states and counties have various rules and laws when it comes to electrical.

I'm going to have to do some serious testing myself considering I just found that mining cards like the p106 that have no display port can be used for rendering. And considering I can get them for a small fraction of what the standard graphics card runs. That's a bigger value that I was looking at with what I talked about above. in short get something like a gtx 1060 power for a fraction of the price. Since this isn't a constant refresh like in a game that you need doing like they do in a mining rig and using USB3 to GPU should be perfectly fine as an option. There are various versions of the p106 such as p106-90, p106-100, p106-400 and even p104s and others. I seen p106s as low as $20 for 3gb version and $60 for 6gb versions.

 

[User #1751331]

You have a lot of options if you don't need to use iRay, because you're not bound to nvidias overprized cards.

Even with Iray you could use the mining gpus that people retired. From what I've seen testing and others. As long as the card works clean it up replace the thermal paste and make use of it. It's a computational load so programs like blender will use them.
In fact most those cards drivers are actually better optimized for that load than standard cards of the same type. Given you can by the p106 verstion of a gtx 1060 6gb for 1/4 and less the cost if you shop. That's a good savings for the power. Of course you can find similar prices on AMD cards that were also used for mining. But mist of those still have outputs and well have a higher resale price because people are buying them still to play games on.

 

[Domiek]

... in short get something like a gtx 1060 power for a fraction of the price. Since this isn't a constant refresh like in a game that you need doing like they do in a mining rig and using USB3 to GPU should be perfectly fine as an option. There are various versions of the p106 such as p106-90, p106-100, p106-400 and even p104s and others. I seen p106s as low as $20 for 3gb version and $60 for 6gb versions.

Keep in mind that your scenes are limited to the card with the lowest amount of memory. Another reason to look into Octane for the Out of Core rendering feature, but I'd still try to fit everything within the ~11GB memory for best speeds.

 

[gamersglory]

The biggest downside to Octane is having to rework everything to work with octane if it could use Nvidia Materials would make things a lot easier. also if it worked natively with Daz vs. that god awful out of date plugin that ports everything in to octane.

 

[recreation]

Even with Iray you could use the mining gpus that people retired. From what I've seen testing and others. As long as the card works clean it up replace the thermal paste and make use of it. It's a computational load so programs like blender will use them.
In fact most those cards drivers are actually better optimized for that load than standard cards of the same type. Given you can by the p106 verstion of a gtx 1060 6gb for 1/4 and less the cost if you shop. That's a good savings for the power. Of course you can find similar prices on AMD cards that were also used for mining. But mist of those still have outputs and well have a higher resale price because people are buying them still to play games on.

True, but I meant the newer cards. Older cards usually don't have that much ram and like Domiek said, it's always good to have much vram for rendering^^

Keep in mind that your scenes are limited to the card with the lowest amount of memory.

If you're talking about iRay then that's an old myth, iRay will use any card that has enough vram for the scene, even if you have another card that doesn't have enough vram.

 

[Domiek]

If you're talking about iRay then that's an old myth, iRay will use any card that has enough vram for the scene, even if you have another card that doesn't have enough vram.

I think we're both saying more or less the same thing. If you have one 8GB card and five 4gb cards, but your scene is over 4gb, those five 4GB cards will not be used for the render. At least that's how it is with both Octane and Cycles and was the case for Iray back when I used it a year ago.

 

[gamersglory]

Newer RTX cards should allow for V-ram pooling via NVlink when using Iray

 

[215303j]

Even if you do find a solution for say 6 GPU's, where are you rendering from? If it's a bedroom in your house and you're located in the US, you're probably going to need to hire an electrician and drop a couple of grand. I have 4 GPU's and once tried vacuuming my office while rendering an animation, the circuit overloaded and killed all power to the office.

You mean the fuse tripped? Or the switchboard burned out?

In case of the second, there was something seriously wrong to begin with.

And, by comparison, a clothes dryer takes 2000-2500 W. That's 4 - 5 PC's. So you may want to use that group and not use the dryer while rendering... If you have separate groups for the washing machine and the dryer, you can install 8-10 PC's, and so on...

 

[User #1751331]

Newer RTX cards should allow for V-ram pooling via NVlink when using Iray

There seems to be a bit of contention on the net as to how well the consumer RTX cards work with vRAM pooling.
That said the general consensus is if you need it use an RTX quadro.

The biggest downside to Octane is having to rework everything to work with octane if it could use Nvidia Materials would make things a lot easier. also if it worked natively with Daz vs. that god awful out of date plugin that ports everything in to octane.

Is this of any relevance? Asking because I primarily use blender and some others. I haven't used Daz or Octane.

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Hardware Architecture
Pooling while it can be a step forward can also have its own issues. You are looking at many of the same issues of two or more CPUs accessing the same memory space. In this case depending on how it is done and what bus it is done over is going to cause more or less of those issues. It's also similar in respect to systems where they cpu and gpu share memory. In formation being contained on the opposite card requires the other card to access it and then work on it. How that is done is varies. Working directly in vRAM would be slow compared to working in a faster cache but that would require pulling that data across and if you have a bunch of cores continually targeting memory in the opposite card that's going to create a bottle neck pretty fast.

Technically it is possible on PCIe systems for cards to access memory on the main card or other cards that register the memory as accessible. Example there are network cards that can be installed on a MB that don't require you to have a CPU at all just ram on the MB. They also make use of all the connected devices like drives and so on.

So it's entirely possible for a graphics card to use the PCIe 16 to communicate to another graphics card. Which is what crossfire on PCIe 3.0 cards can do. Thus not needing the crossfire bridge. Which means they could technically take advantage of that ability and access one another's memory over the PCIe bus.

Side note: There is a lot of comments on sites talking about directX 12 allowing this. Honestly, DirectX 12 isn't needed nor is windows or an OS for a card to access another card. This is firmware level it can be done at.

Currently there is an issue if you pair two cards that have different size memories the system will match both cards to the lower cards memory size. This is because of the simplified work sharing scheme being used.
Is it possible for them to create a better method. Yes, but it would effectively require creating two different firmwares that can be switched between or a better option is take the Vulkan API concept and expand it to allow that much more control.
In truth they could use a method that uses current rasterization methods to analyze a scene and it would take about the time it takes to normally render a scene in a video game to improve the algorithm for each scene. Of course you wouldn't want that run every time a game draws a frame or you would get 50% of the frame rate. So being able to switch it on and off would be the minimal requirement. Which is why I said it would take effectively two versions of firmware. Or the better option being able to directly control or write that aspect via API like vulkan would be the most ideal solution.


That said none of what I just covered provides a current solution to the issues.

 

[User #1751331]

You mean the fuse tripped? Or the switchboard burned out?

In case of the second, there was something seriously wrong to begin with.

And, by comparison, a clothes dryer takes 2000-2500 W. That's 4 - 5 PC's. So you may want to use that group and not use the dryer while rendering... If you have separate groups for the washing machine and the dryer, you can install 8-10 PC's, and so on...

Ok, wall outlets in the US and Europe are generally covered under NFPA(national fire protection agency)NEC(National electrical code) or IBC(international building codes) and so on and are rated at 15 amps per outlet connection. That means that double wall plug both of those can only add up to 15 amps usage. The breaker is supposed to be rated for 15 amps to protect it the wall wiring is usually for those breakers 14 AWG.(American wire gauge)
That however depends on if you are using stranded and the type of insulator also also if it is copper or aluminum. Frankly, I refuse to use aluminum wiring. Here is a chart to give you an idea.

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Your wiring in one room isn't supposed to be connected to wiring in another room under current standards it's been that way for a number of years. However older homes that isn't necessarily true. Also lights and wall outlets are supposed to be separate these days.

Take my home for example.
I have a 200AMP main feed and breaker. The box is 24 breakout. The largest load is the AC unit at 60AMPs 220v single phase. The second is as Thialf mentioned the drier. It's a 20 amp break for single phase 220v. That's generally what most homes are in the US. 220v single phase coming in broken off each leg single phase for 110v. Europe 220v is standard to most wall outlets. I guess that also depends on where you live. Which is why a lot of appliances have switches to change the power from 110 to 220.

Thailf is correct in saying plugging in the vacuum should not have tripped your entire offices power. At most it should have done is trip the wall outlet. That said it also depends on how much of a load you have on your entire office as well. Mind you breakers have a bit of extra they can handle to keep them from tripping under normal loads and higher temperatures and so on.
Example a breaker rated for 15amps could actually require 20amps to trip it. Breakers have two tripping mechanisms.

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if your curious. The one that should have been in effect with you is the heat one where the bimetallic strip broke the circuit.

 

[Domiek]

Thailf is correct in saying plugging in the vacuum should not have tripped your entire offices power. At most it should have done is trip the wall outlet. That said it also depends on how much of a load you have on your entire office as well.

A 2080ti can draw up to 300watts. 4 of them + decent vacuum in the same room definitely can and does flip the fuse during a render.

 

[User #1751331]

A 2080ti can draw up to 300watts. 4 of them + decent vacuum in the same room definitely can and does flip the fuse during a render.

I didn't say it wouldn't blow a fuse. I said it shouldn't trip the main. It should have only tripped wall outlet breaker or fuse.
Below is a basic standard house wiring diagram for a circuit breaker box and a few circuits.
As you can see the wall outlets are on a separate breaker from the lights. Technically they don't share the same neutral wire I did that to simplify the diagram. Other wise the neutral wire would be overloaded do to to much current.
I also left the grounds off because they aren't in use during normal operation.

The main amp in the diagram is a 200 amp breaker it has to be large enough to handle the load of all the breakers below it combined. It also can not exceed the bus rating that being the Blue and burgundy/brown lines in the diagram.
Hope that clarifies what was being said. The way I know is 20+ years in electrical.

 

[215303j]

Nice write-up tacm ! I never thought to discuss electrical engineering on a porn games forum...
You must have a pretty huge AC system though...

 

[User #1751331]

Nice write-up tacm ! I never thought to discuss electrical engineering on a porn games forum...
You must have a pretty huge AC system though...

It's ok. 2000ft home plus servers running full time. But most of that 60Amp is start up current don't forget.
Neither did I someone else brought it up. I figured well it technically is useful information regarding the topic so why not.