Cost per hour per proc for 3D rendering?

[Anson Fogel]

A writer friend asked me this and thought I'd see if anyone in the CG FX community here has any ideas or data - need to figure out a ballpark estimate for a $/processor hour for 3d cloud rendering. Any idea?

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Rebus is about $0.10 per Ghz hour.

We've never had very good luck though with any render-farm provider.

That's $0.10 per hour per core so a modern 3Ghz processor * 4 cores = 12*0.10 = $1.20 per hour per computer.

If you just have 10 computers that's $12 an hour. You can build 10 i7 render machines for less than $10,000. That'll pay itself off in a couple of months.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Gavin's rates sound pretty accurate. I also have to agree that render farm services are usually lacking unless you can actually work with them on-site and deal directly with them to get your projects set up and rendering properly.

I managed a render farm of my own a few years back. Comprised mostly of dual CPU AMD Athlon/FX CPUs from 1.2GHz to 1.8GHz across 24 systems at its largest point. This farm replaced an earlier one based on 800MHz to 1GHz PIII CPUs. That was un ugly farm, literally motherboards installed with RAM and CPUs, some of the overclocked, and bolted right to rack shelves with PSUs sitting behind them. Hehe.

System prices and rates were pretty much the same then with my AMD farm. CPU power has increased a couple times over the last 6 years or so since I was last doing this, but client demands for render quality and output resolutions have also increased so it balances out I think. All the animation I do these days is for my own internal projects, mostly pre-viz stuff lately. Here and there I work on some modeling and other CGI for a Sci-Fi feature of mine that has been in perpetual pre-production for the past 18 months...