Render farm hardware: Which render farm has the best hardware?

Sometimes, I chat with my friends about render farms and my blog. One of my friends, who is also an artist, told me ‘how do you buy a new computer, find a render farm in the same way’. I think about it and he has a point there. Isn’t the purpose of both to get more powerful hardware so that I can speed up my workloads.

Which professional render farm doesn’t have the capacity of thousands of computers? They all do. However, that huge amount of resources (render farm hardware) will be limited to a much smaller amount for each user, each render job and also depending on a certain time. Those are objective factor I can’t control. So what can I and other users do to get the most rendering performance for the money spent?

That’s right! Find a render farm with powerful hardware. ‘How do you buy a new computer, find a render farm in the same way’.

So in this post, I am going to shop around the hardware of render farms. Again, there are so many online render farms in the world. I just select the most popular render farms as my first post ‘find the best render farm for my studio‘ mentioned. Those render farms in turn are:

• Foxrenderfarm
• Garagefarm
• iRender
• RanchComputing
• Rebusfarm

Summary of Render farm hardware

To begin with, here is the hardware summary of the 5 render farms that I have gathered. I get information from the official website, some trusted third parties. I also ask the render farms.

CPU farm

* I can’t find the Cinebench of Dual Xeon E5-2690 v2. So I take the Cinebench of Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 and multiply it by 2. The actual score is probably a little lower than the above result. If you have the correct score, let me know. I will correct it.

** Update on March, 2023: CPUs of Foxrenderfarm and new CPU of iRender.

GPU farm

I will talk in detail about each render farm.

Render farm hardware

CPU render farm hardware

Regarding CPU, five render farms use both manufacturers Intel and AMD. Rebusfarm and iRender have the most powerful CPU as to multi core performance. For 3D rendering, the higher the multi core score (Cinebench), the better. But any CPU above 20 000 multi core points will allow you to render complex scenes in no time. 

In addition, some tasks are dependent on high single core performance, or tend to run better on CPUs that have a high single core performance and won’t scale that well on CPUs with a lot of cores. However, since Garagefarm doesn’t show the full CPU name, I can’t add single core criteria to compare. At least, they include the multi core score of their CPUs so I have the data to put in the comparison table. Garage has 4 types of nodes: 1x Intel Xeon, 2x Intel Xeon, 4x Intel Xeon and 1x AMD Epyc.

Foxrenderfarm even doesn’t give any detail about their CPU. I can only choose by number of cores (16, 24, 28 cores).

iRender uses two processors from AMD manufacturer, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3955WX and 5975WX. Their nodes also have 1 CPU each. RanchComputing, on the other hand, uses two Intel CPU models. Each node has at least dual CPUs. RanchComputing’s website also doesn’t update often, they only provide CineBench R15/R20 scores of the nodes (no R23). But Cinebench scores are different and can’t be compared between major versions.

Lastly, Rebusfarm offers CPU server with 2 processors from Intel and AMD. However, I do not find any information about the number of CPUs per node.

GPU render farm hardware

Regarding GPU, five render farms all use NVIDIA graphics cards. They use mostly NVIDIA RTX GPUs because this series is the best for rendering. Currently, iRender offers the most powerful GPU model, the RTX 4090 which is twice the power of the second ranked card, the RTX 3090. On the sideline, I know iRender expanded to offer RTX 4090 servers together with the default RTX 3090 servers, after the card 4090 was released.

Recently, I notice that they have replaced the 1x 3090 node with 1x 4090 node. I predict that they are gradually upgrading the whole farm to RTX 4090. Wow, this render farm is very rich. Their hardware upgrade speed is fast, too. I checked their website. Now, iRender offers the following choices: 2x 3090, 4x 3090, 8x 3090, 1x 4090, 2x 4090, 4x 4090. I’m very excited to see if they have any hardware upgrade in the near future, maybe in next month.

Foxrenderfarm has the most GPU types of the five render farms. But I only appreciate the RTX 3090. GTX 1080Ti and RTX 2080Ti are two wanted cards a few years ago, but now they are behind in speed compared to newer cards. Another good reason is that these two cards only have 11 GB of VRAM. RTX 3060 is no good, either. Its Octanebench score loses to RTX 2080Ti while its VRAM is 12 GB – only a little more than 11 GB. So I keep choosing RTX 3090 when rendering GPU on Foxrenderfarm. However, the RTX 3090 is often busy.

Garagefarm states on its website that they have 2 types of GPUs: RTX A5000 and Tesla P100. Looks like the RTX A5000 is new server as I only saw the P100 option when I made the Foxrenderfarm vs Garagefarm video for the Render farm battle post. I think this is reasonable. Since a 2x A5000 node already has a higher Octanebench score than a 4x P100 node. Right now, Garagefarm provides the following 3 types of nodes: 2x A5000, 4x P100 and 8x P100.

RanchComputing and Rebusfarm are both pretty tight-lipped about the GPUs they use. In addition, it seems they don’t update the website often either. RanchComputing says its GPU farm uses high-end NVIDIA cards with 11 – 24 GB VRAM. Each node scores 1400 to 2700 OctaneBench points (version 2020.1.5). This information is quite general. Rebusfarm is even funnier. On the main site, Rebusfarm says they use NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 (380 Octanebench points) while on another page, they say the farm is equipped with the latest GPUs, each with 217 Octanebench points. This is very confusing.

My thought

After all, among render farm hardware, I appreciate iRender’s hardware the most. They are very clear about the CPU and GPU model they use, as well as the number of CPUs and GPUs per node. That’s why users like me easily look up and compare. Moreover, they have fast hardware upgrade speed – the only render farm using the RTX 4090 so far.

The second place is Garagefarm. Garagefarm is also quite clear about its node specs, upgrades its render farm hardware from time to time. However, I wish they showed the full CPU name instead of just the product line name like that.