This is part II of my renderfarm experiment, dedicated to animation. The version of V5i used is build 278257. The protocol is the same as in part I, with the same renderfarm, but the goal this time is to evaluate the efficiency in animation, which is after all the main reason to use a renderfarm. This time I used the Windy Hill scene, which is available on the V5i CD. The parameters are the default : final rendering mode, 320 x 180, 250 frames rendered for a ten seconds shot @ 25 frames per second. The time needed to save the individual frames at the end is included (about 17 seconds). PC 1 added (Dual Opteron 275 @ 2442 MHz) : 23 mn 06 s (rendered as a rendercow node) PC 2 added (Dual Xeon @ 2800 MHz) : 16 mn 03 s PC 3 added (Pentium 4C @ 3200 MHz) : 13 mn 21 s PC 4 added (Pentium 4C @ 3400 Mhz) : 11 mn 31 s PC 5 added (Pentium 4C @ 3300 Mhz) : 10 mn 03 s PC 6 added (Pentium 4C @ 3300 MHz) : 8 mn 50 s PC 7 added (Athlon 64 @ 2450 MHz) : 7 mn 49 s PC 8 added (Athlon 64 @ 2400 MHz) : 7 mn 02 s PC 9 added (Athlon 64 @ 2400 MHz) : 6 mn 22 s PC 10 added (Athlon XP @ 2250 MHz) : 6 mn 03 s Details of the number of frames rendered and average frame time : PC1 : 61 f - 03s PC2 : 28 f - 06s PC3 : 18 f - 14s PC4 : 21 f - 10s PC5 : 20 f - 10s PC6 : 22 f - 09s PC7 : 24 f - 09s PC8 : 24 f - 08s PC9 : 23 f - 09s PC10 : 17 f - 15s You can see that the total number of frames rendered is superior to 250 (258). It seems a few frames were rendered more than once. As you can see the renderfarm rendered the animation 3.82 times faster than the fastest machine. This ratio is better than with a still image (see part I), but that was expected. Using the same ratio, we can deduce that a 24 hours long animation using the Dual Opteron 275 alone (at 5 mn 45 s per frame and 250 frames) would be rendered in 6 h 17 mn by the entire renderfarm. The same animation would take about 4 days on a single Athlon XP 2250 MHz machine. Interestingly, I did not experienced a single crash and did not have to quit and reload a single time, even when adding the rendercows one after the other and rendering again. HyperVue seems much more stable in animation than in single image tile rendering.