Server farm vs. single machine with 4 GPUs

[whoacowboy]

I was wondering if anybody had any experience with server farms.

I currently render 10000s of images at a time, mostly from Daz3D. I create the animations on my main workstation and then render the frames on another single machine that has 4 NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPUs. When I am rendering I notice that each of my GPU is only appears to be using 4% of it's processing power and it's not evenly distributed across GPUs. My workstation has one Titan XP and my render machine renders 4x+ faster which is what I would expect.

I have been wondering if getting Nvidia's Iray Server and spreading my GPUs across 4 render node machines increased my performance. The appeal of the farm would be that I could add machines as needed to increase my performance further.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[Alex Glawion]

Where are you checking the GPU utilization? The Win Taskmanager does not report CUDA utilization correctly and you'll see just about around 4% when doing full renders here.

Then there's the question of what render engine you are using. DAZ Filament? Or a third party render engine like octane? Be sure the render engine you are using actually supports gpus (and supports multi-gpu as well) and doesn't just run on your cpu.

If you're utilizing a render engine that supports gpus but not multi-gpu, you can use a render manager such as thinkbox deadline to render multiple frames at once, each gpu then rendering their own frame.

 

[whoacowboy]

Hi Alex, Thanks for the response. I was using the Win Task Manager, do you know a better way to determine usage. I was using a command line utility when I was on a Mac but now that I am on Windows I am a little unclear on how to do this. On the Mac it showed a usage of all four GPUs and they maxed out at 25%. It was a Hackintosh and I was told that the Mac OS doesn't support IRAY as well as Windows so I switched it over.

I am using the NVIDIA Iray engine.



Which I believe utilizes all of the GPUs.

I want to move over to the Iray Server so I can add some more machines. Since I only showed my Mac utilizing 25% of the GPU processeor, that is when I started thinking of creating a farm, thus the source of my initial question.

 

[Alex Glawion]

Yes Iray should utilize them fully. Use GPU-Z to check your GPU's utilization: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/

The "Sensors" Tab will show you the GPU utilization. You can switch through your GPUs at the bottom.