few notes:
Thank you for your answer Ondra.
Offtopic more or lessTalking about CPUs/GPUs is a pretty interesting thing. I am planning to push my career towards freelancing because of different reasons. It is a longer term plan, lets say in a year.
Ofcourse money (I mean the amount of money what I actually have or what I would like to spend on start later) is an important aspect. I am planning to buy a powerful workstation in the next couple of months (what I would be able to use as a render machine as well) and I am confused a little bit.
It looks like the only smart solution atm are those Threadrippers with 24/32 cores.
I worked in three different offices in the past 6 years. In all of them they used Vray when I started and especially 5-6 years ago (be honest) that was the right decision. In 2 of the 3 offices we were able to persuade our boss(es) to switch to Corona from Vray.
In my opinion the end result of Corona is nicer, especially the light distribution. The rendering speed of Corona has been always an issue (in my actual office we use 24 (a little bit older, but still decent dual xeons as a farm, the approx speed of one of them (with 2 xeons) is like a modern 12 core i9, so lets say 24 of those). Even with those machines (in distributed, split render) sometimes we have crazy render times (4 hours in 4-5k but most of our scenes are heavy).
Thats why I said it depends where we look the case from. As an artist, I prefer more photrealism as a wannabe freelancer I prefer speed and less RAM usage. I am fighting inside with myself. :)
If I would be able to make decisions which way Corona would follow, according to my brain I would choose speed, according to my heart I would choose more photorealism.
Personally I prefer to keep the noise level of my renders pretty low, I use 2% what can be an overkill to some people. I like the real time denoiser but I don't like to use the denoiser in the final render (that will change no later than on that day when
I will need to provide the necessary computer power for the renders :)) I know, probably its a huge mistake to use 2% of noise without any denoising at the end but I like to keep the end result of my renders as less affected as possible.
From this aspect I think some kind of Hybrid solution is important. Let's say if it would be possible to speed up the scene parsing process with a GPU or the displacement calculation, that would be a big plus. To be honest I know nothing about computer programming I have never been interested in that thing. I have no idea what can be possible and what is not.
According to those pretty expensive CPUs (lets talk about gaming cards because those are the things what most mortal can afford) even a powerful GPU (2080Ti) is cheap.
CPU wise, what is your opinion, which would be better as a start? To buy a more powerful workstation (let's say the the 32 core AMD) and buy separate render machines later or buy a less powerful workstation (let's say an 8-12 core intel) and buy separate render machine(s) the same time as well?
I think, these days, when GPUs are more and more powerful for less and less money you can't avoid (at least you have to think about it as a future plan) to go towards some kind of hybrid solution. If you can archive 50% more speed with the cost of €5000 CPUs or the same with €2500 GPUs, probably nobody would say: don't do it.
What is your opinion about those things above?
Another interesting thing is (I am not going to ask your opinion about that :)), which render engine to chose. Atm, Vray (especially according to speed and reliability in distributed) is more safe, more predictible. But Corona, according to quality, "friendlyness" and my heart is a better solution. If
you make money with it and not "just" your boss (if he reads this, I love him ofcourse), speed is important, or more than important and "safety" as well.