Online render farms – are they irreplaceable?
Many of us have at least once in a lifetime used an online
render farm. Conclusions? Those facilities are extremaly useful, but also a little bit expensive. Fortunately, ne farms are created, so we could have hope, that in a few years, they would be much cheaper. But what if they would be obsolete, because of the increasing computing power of personal hardware?
This sounds reasonable – personal computers are constantly increasing their computing power, so in a few years they can be as powerful as render farms were in last two or three years. And if something like that would happen, then why bother and send projects to rendering farms, when we can achieve the same effect on our own hardware?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Of course, the computing power is growing, so are the requirements needed to perform rendering process. When we would like to perform rendering in a quality that was standard several years ago, we would perform it on our usual hardware, that we use to work right now (let’s say: Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB RAM and some good GPU) and it wouldn’t take much time to perform it. In other words – we wouldn’t need online render farm to render that kind of graphics.
But, if we would like to do it in a quality, that is used as a standard today, we would have to wait at least couple of hours, and maybe couple of days, to see the effects. That’s why we need online render farms.
Will they be needed in a couple of years? Of course they will. Although today it may seem weird, the power of our personal hardware would stop growin soon. Not because the capabilities of development will run out – on the contrary, this will be caused by the development itself.
How? It’s really easy: online render farm works thanks to the cloud computing technology – the technology, that allows to gain access to the massive computing power via the internet. The same technology will cause, that more and more software will be available only thru the internet. And therefore, we will need cheaper and weaker hardware to run it – because they will actually run on powerful hardware in the cloud.
Is it good? Well, this will cause, that the prices will fall. And that’s always good.
