Hi KeyShot Community,
I’ve been tasked with researching the ideal computer for network rendering, and I could really use some guidance. We work in the retail sector, developing solutions like self-checkouts and gates. As a result, we often create complex products, and rendering them in contextual environments puts a significant strain on our current systems. This has led us to look into purchasing a powerful computer that can be used for KeyShot network rendering.
My questions are:
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What kind of hardware specifications would you recommend for this type of work?
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Do you think a budget of $5000 is reasonable for a computer capable of handling these demands?
I appreciate any advice you can provide. Thanks in advance!
Think it’s good to mention how you currently render products, using CPU or GPU and what current hardware is. Especially when rendering objects in environments it could be quite heavy on VRAM of a GPU which will limit the options for that matter.
If you want you may share a scene and I can check how fast my hardware (GPU) will render it or if it’s maybe too heavy to render over GPU. Might give you an idea on what to expect. You can send me a private message via this forum if you like.
I personally see network rendering more as a network of computers which all take part in rendering a single image or handling a queue of renders together.
Since you talk about a single computer, I think it doesn’t need to be complicated. Basically you could just copy your files over to the network computer and put your render in the queue, so it gets processed.
That way you don’t really need a specific license for a network but you will be also a bit more limited since there’s not really a remote access to control the queue etc. Other than just go to the machine or use something like remote desktop.
If the machine is being used 24/7 to render I would pick a more pro solution so it’s also extendable to multiple machines. But if I see how fast my GPU can render certain scenes I wonder if that investment is needed. For € 5000 you get a nice machine but it’s important to know if you want to go the CPU way or GPU way. Has an impact on price but also render times.
Thanks for your quick response. We’re planning to get the ASUS GeForce RTX 4090 24GB. Our most complex scenes use 12GB of RAM, so the 24GB should cover our needs as we create more detailed scenes.
To answer your earlier question, we plan to use GPU rendering. We’re also rethinking whether we really need network rendering. Unfortunately, I can’t share any scenes due to confidentiality.
Thanks again for your time and insights.
I’m using a 4090 + 3090 (in one PC) but the 4090 is really a beast. I’m personally using a pretty old CPU (i9-9900K) and it doesn’t make a lot of difference if I compare benchmark scores. The CPU and DRAM are used to fill the VRAM of the GPU so it might go a bit faster with a modern CPU but compared to render times it’s negligible.
So with your budget you could maybe even squeeze in 2 4090’s. Which won’t double your VRAM but it will cut render times in close to half. That’s also something you can do at a later stage. If you might consider that remember you do need a nice and heavy PSU. I would go for a ATX 3.0 PSU of 1500W which has 2 of those new connectors which support 600W over a single cable. Saves you a lot of cable(splitters) inside your PC.
And be sure to connect the 4090 very well to the cable, there are many people with melted connectors and that’s an expensive repair.
My 4090 is one which is water cooled (GigaByte Waterforce). That was the only way I could also fit it together with my older 3090. So if you might extend to two cards in future a big case and nice placing of the PCIe slots on the motherboard is a big plus.
My PCIe slots are just 2 slots apart. My 3090 is 2 slots high but if I put a 4090 directly under it there’s no room for airflow at all. The 4090 is now mounted vertically. Tight fit still but it works like a charm.
If you want me to render some demo scene of KeyShot so you can compare render times a bit, let me know. The KeyShot Viewer benchmark is not that usable I think to compare. The GPU scene is rendered so fast (couple of seconds) that you get weird results.
You could also take a look at this: V-Ray 6 Benchmark (chaos.com)
Those are V-Ray benchmark results with CUDA and the ratio between (multiple) cards is about the same in KeyShot. My CUDA score is there as well with 9692. Top score has 18 4090s connected, well hard to beat 
Hard to get in a case as well.
There are also companies that can build custom liquid cooled PC which are expensive and maybe a bit too much. They are very silent though and you can add more cards in a single PC.
Don’t think anyone who renders will regret a 4090. I’m every time still surprised how fast it can do things. Same with running AI stable diffusion from my local PC. Not that I need it, but it’s interesting and it can be done. I would love KeyShot to have some VRAM memory saving options implemented but if you’re now using around 12GB there’s some buffer.
well, the nice thing with a budget like that is that you could load the render node with dual GPU’s.
There are only 2 of us at my current workplace, but the one thing that we did that increased our productivity by at least 50% was get a render node. It MORE than pays for itself, as now we are able to work on a scene, get it all set and offload it to render and then we can move on to the next project. Before we had the render node, we would be basically locked out of using our workstations while it was rendering. We are using CPU rendering, and I just put in the requisition for 3 new workstations that are 4090 based. but we are getting chassis and MOBO’s that can handle dual GPU’s so they are upgradable in the future. Our dual xeon workstations are not really upgradable at all, and the HP Z8 chassis won’t hold the 4080/4090 card frames, they are too large.
So, for $5000, you can easily get a workable 4090 single GPU based workstation AND a 1 year license for network rendering. and from what I can tell, the network rendering licenses is still tied to core count, so you can just buy the cheapest NR license and use the GPU side of things.
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Nice to hear how it all improved at your place! The 4090s are not exactly cheap if you consider them a consumer gaming card but they have such incredible performance using them for render/video encoding and other GPU accelerated tasks. Like you said, they easily pay for themselves if you render a lot. And I like the fact that animations and rendering in general get more fun since you don’t have to wait hours 