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10 Gigabit Ethernet Performance

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Dalton Watts:
Hello guys,

So, I was thinking about buying another dual socket workstation and connect it directly to my other dual Xeon workstation via 10gbe PCI cards so I could further improve speed.

What performance should I expect from this sort of setup? Will the slave computer react swiftly (as in participating in the rendering) just like the main one when dealing with interactive rendering, for instance?

If so, what PCI cards would you recommend? ASUS XG-C100C maybe? Thanks!

Dalton Watts:
Anyone...? :)

How does Corona handle this type of setup regarding interactive rendering?

Also, will the slave participate in the "rendering initial pass" as quickly as the main workstation when starting a production render?

maru:
Hi, here are some answers:
1) Corona does not support any kind of interactive rendering + distributed rendering combo. One of the main reasons for this is that we want to keep IR as smooth as possible, and using DR with it would introduce lags. On the other hands we know that some other renderers offer this, so it might be added in the future (however no specific plans for now, so definitely distant future).
2) DR is not instant, especially with heavy scenes. The scene has to be sent to the node computers, 3ds max has to start, it takes some time. With an extremely simple scene I am guessing that you can get multiple computers working on the same image in a few seconds (10 maybe?). In heavier scenes it can be much slower, depending for example on the amount of assets that have to be sent to the node PCs. (not that the assets will be sent from the master to the nodes only in case it's necessary)

Other than that I cannot really tell you how specific hardware with specific bandwidth will behave as I do not have experience with this. Maybe someone else can share their findings.

Dalton Watts:
Thank you for your clear answer, Marcin!

Anybody with direct experience with a similar kind of setup would be great to hear. Here I am thinking I can connect the upcoming Threadripper 2990X with my dual 2696 v3 setup and gather 10k+ cinebench power under one roof (kind of...) over 10gbe.

Do you know if vray IPR works in tandem with DR?

Juraj:
I've been running 10GBE setup for 2 years now. It's drastic improvement, and imho absolute must for Distributed.

With 1GB, distributed would regularly completely stop because all those large .exr files being sent are simply too big. This happens if you have more then 1 node and render something like 8k renders.
Making the intervals too long or amount of pixels being send lower invalidates the usability of distributed so I never opted for this.

DR is still too slow to start, I don't know why this is. The scenes on slaves always take like 10 times the time during the "pre-pass" stages than they do on workstation. I always check task manager and see that the damn slave is using 1-core for like 2 minutes before it moves to other part of prepass before finally starting to render.
I basically gave up on using DR for test renders, it's uselessly slow so I only use it for finals. I don't have 5 minutes before it starts sending passes, which is what it usually takes.

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