The essential hardware of render farm: iray

There are lots of hardware that can be used in render farms, some kinds of them are popular, which could be used by lots of people, and others may be used by a small group, that some render farms can’t support them. NVIDIA has done more than almost any other company to promote GPU rendering and its uses in a wide range of entertainment applications. Iray, from NVIDIA, which is the essential hardware of render farm, is offered as both a GPU renderer and a cloud render farm solution, distributed solution. iray targets interactive design, versus mental ray, which is focused on feature film and TV production.

Gary M Davis, Autodesk Senior Technical Specialist, Media & Entertainment, says: “iray is mostly known as a photoreal renderer for design viz but I’ve been challenged to show it in more entertainment uses and like it more every day. I just got set up with a Boxx workstation running NVIDIA’s Maximus GPU board(s) setup and it’s amazing what one PC can do.”

It is one of render farm hardware accelerated by Cuda but if not present still works on CPU and it is designed for physically-based photorealism.

Davis expands further: “Technically NVIDIA Maximus is the pairing of a Quadro 6000 and a Tesla 2075 in one machine. Other combinations of cards can be done but these two have been branded “Maximus” for marketing purposes. Each offer 6gb of memory and that’s huge. 3ds Max can intelligently work with multiple GPU cards in user defined ways. For example, test renders can use a feature called Activeshade on one card that’s constantly rendering while the other maintains smooth viewport interaction for the user experience while modeling and lighting. Then when you’re ready to do a final production render you can enable all the Cuda cores on all GPU boards present.”

For example, unlike what would clearly happen with a CPU renderer in any render farm, “Adding motion blur and/or depth of field using iRay doesn’t add render time. That’s pretty amazing and cool.” Iray has beed asked many times, so render farm servicers should support it anyway, or they will lose lots of clients.