I just wanted to share some interesting info with you, in regards to the Render Farm I put together..

Here is the hardware setup

Master PC: Compaq Persario - 2.0Ghz / 1GB Ram - Windows XP Pro

PC#1. AMD Barton 2800+ OC'ed to 2.0GHZ (512MB Dual Channel Memory) - Windows XP Pro
PC#2. PIII 1000    - 1 Ghz / 768 MB Ram both @ 133 Bus Speed - Windows 2000 Pro
PC#3. PIII 800EB - 800Mhz / 768 MB Ram both @ 133 Bus Speed - Windows 2000 Pro
PC#4. PIII 800EB - 800Mhz / 768 MB Ram both @ 133 Bus Speed - Windows 2000 Pro
PC#5. PIII 700EB - 700Mhz / 768 MB Ram both @ 133 Bus Speed - Windows 2000 Pro
PC#6. PIII 600EB - 600Mhz / 768 MB Ram both @ 133 Bus Speed - Windows 2000 Pro

I used Omac2's Bryce 6 Benchmark www.alexpensotti.com/bench2.html

Here is the results I got using Bryce 6.1

First I rendered the scene using PC #1 standalone and got 18:56
I rendered the scene again using PC#1 but through Bryce Lighting and got time of 20:00 a difference of 1:04

I than proceeded to add the next pc and rendering the same scene recording the results as I went along.  The final test utilizing all PC's with a render time of 8:37 a difference of 11:23 or 54.49%.

Whats interesting about the final Render Time of 8:37, is the same as  an Athalon X2 4800 which is  a 2 Core CPU.

Now unfortunately I did not have an Animation benchmark file to test with...would be interesting to see how that would turn out.

Now while I was doing these tests...  I decided to throw Carrara into the mix and see what kind of render times I would get.

I used a default scene included in Carrara and did the some render tests...one thing I'd like to note is, network rendering in Carrara is different than Bryce.  You have control over Tile Size 32-128 and how to distribute the job load over the render farm... No Load, Odd, Even.

Using the default scene I did a bunch of render tests and the difference between a single PC and all the PC's in the render farm only yielded a savings of 4 Seconds!!! Yup 4 Seconds.  Not much.

So I decided to test one of the included Animations which had something like 768 Frames.  I decided this time I would skip the single PC Render, I was pretty sick of doing all these tests.  So I concentrated on all PC's rendering and played with Tile Size and Render Load settings.  And the end result was very interesting.  The Longest Render time was over 1 hour and the shortest render time was 36 minutes.  That is quite a big difference in render time by simply tuning settings on how the network render should be carried out.

So whats the conclusion? Well I think first of all what I've build is not economical, when you consider you can get the same results with a Single High End PC, with a Dual Core processor.  I would like to do some Animation tests in Bryce and see if it does any better.

Still almost 55% savings in rendering time is not bad from PC's that I built from Junk Parts.

I think it may be possible to get better results with the same software, but maybe with better Network Rendering engine for Bryce.  What do you think?