Makes sense, but when you only have two PC's which are connected in the same room through a small (but fast) switch. I'd expect to see some pretty instant speed improvement when the node kicks in, especially when the node is twice as fast as the host to render a single frame. I'm also rendering images which take 5 hours+.
Admittedly I need to find a day where I can leave a render going on one machine until completion and then render again with DR on and a do a full comparison to completion. It's just not always practical in a production environment. It was obvious in VRay when you could see buckets, it's guesswork in Corona (any progressive renderer) without actually sitting there for a full render to complete as described above.
The best thing is to see how many passes your DR node did and subract that from the total amount. Then you will know which node rendered how much of the image.
You need to keep an eye on the stats while it renders or setup a screenshot program to take screenshots every minute or so.
It's a paint to test, but ya, vray with bucket shows machine name while rendering, but this is different, because each machine gets the full image to work on for a full pass.
It's better to setup test scenes which are known to render for 1 hour on one machine for example then do test on DR. In my experience is like it will be about 80% of the capacity of the second machine because of the extra waiting time for network traffic and job management from the master. Takes time to do these tests, but it's good to know your tools and what to expect
so you know how to set the deadlines and costs for the clients, for me an extra 30% of what I estimate is my golden number which I add all the time, even if I do a great work planning, it's going to be always something which requires more attention if it's a new project.
I would also recommend having the master machine the strongest if it's also doing rendering, otherwise it won't have enough cores to distribute the job to the slave, and slave might be waiting much longer for a job.
In some situations you can setup the master machine not to do any rendering at all if you use more DR nodes, so it will just spawn jobs for the nodes and compute the final image.
Good luck!
