Render slave - RAM vs Core count

[Fluid_Jamie]

EDIT: I've just seen the Hardware Child board, please move if appropriate!

Hi All,

I apologise if this is the incorrect section...

I'm looking to add a small farm with 3 or 4 render slaves to our studio and have started the process of looking into machine specifications.

I was under the impression that the RAM required to render a scene correlates to the CPU core count, so in theory if the workstations are 12/16 core machines and have 32gb RAM, 6 core slaves would be ok with 32gb? Please correct me if I'm wrong!

I'm working to a budget, and using 32gb of RAM could mean a whole extra slave or two extra over 64gb machines.

I hope you can help!

[Charlie Nicols]

There is no correlation between core count and the amount of RAM required in the scenario.

32GB will be a struggle with imagery over 4K resolution with passes +denoising however if your workstations are geared towards 32 then having WS+Render nodes on 32GB won't be a problem.


Overall I would highly recommend buying 64GB of RAM Per node and then getting as many cores as you can.

Pick core/thread cont over Speed (GHz) as this will usually provide you with greater rendering output (ie the XEON range). You can buy a lot of 2nd hand older gen Xeons that data centers sell on, this is a super cheap and effective way to gain render power if you can assemble the machines yourself.