Render Farm Price: Buying and Renting

Eventually, every 3D professional considers building their own rendering station for commercial and personal projects. They look up their desired processor, RAM bars, a powerful cooling system, etc. And looking at any render farm price, it is obvious not everyone can afford it. We understand the need for fast rendering and would argue that using an online render farm is a much better choice.

Megarender is a cloud farm on AMD Threadrippers 3990X, the most powerful processor on the current market; each machine has 256 GB RAM. Up to 10 servers work on one scene simultaneously: they build a single image together or separately render frames of a sequence. Why is this better than a personal render farm?

Fast

On our farm, each image is rendered by the most powerful CPU on the market: AMD Threadripper 3990X. You can launch up to 6 tasks at once; for animations we have special pools of processors that render 10 frames simultaneously, meaning at the highest rate you will be getting 60 frames at a time. This reduces rendering times tenfold and even more, compared to a common PC. To figure out the approximate time of finishing your project on the farm, use our cost calculator.

During the rendering on a farm your computer is free to use to work on other projects, and you don’t have to waste time waiting for it to finish.

Convenient

Through our online service you can launch your 3DS MAX project at any moment. Our 24/7 support team will answer any question you have and also assist with manually rendering Maya, Cinema4D, and Blender files. We support all the latest versions of V-Ray and Corona Renderer. We also have all the popular plugins installed: Forest Pack, RailClone, Phoenix FD, Anima XYZ, Multiscatter, and many more. If you don’t see the required plugin in the list, contact us and we will try and install it swiftly.

To upload the scene to the farm, use our Megaplugin. It collects all the assets in a single archive: textures, caches and settings. After uploading, all the settings will be available in the task launching interface to check and change.

All the information about uploaded scenes and their render status is available in your account. After rendering has started, the preview button appears. To receive your bonus MegaCredits to test our service, confirm your phone number in the Bonuses tab. We don’t add any watermarks to the images rendered this way, and you can use them commercially without any limits.

Affordable

In many cases, it is cheaper to use render farm services instead of maintaining your own. Buying even a single server is a major investment, and it will pay off only if used constantly without breaks.

The price of a good rendering server based on AMD Threadripper 3960X (a powerful but reasonably priced CPU) and with proper cooling installed is around $4000. This price may fluctuate though due to the popularity of cryptocurrencies and the constant emergence of new algorithms. 

Let’s calculate how much time it will take to pay off such an investment compared to using Megarender. You will get a volume discount of 30% when replenishing your balance for $4000 and receive 5720 MC. Rendering one big image on our servers will take around 30 minutes and will cost 3 MC, so you have enough to render 1906 images. Rendering the same images on the 3960X server will take at least 3 times longer.

Let’s assume you do one project a week, each resulting in 10 shots from different perspectives. On the render farm, they will be finished in 5 hours, and on the 3960X server, it will take around 15 hours. So it will take you 381 projects or over 7 years to see a return on this investment. This number will rise if you need less than 10 shots or if you skip several weeks a year for a vacation. Additionally, your server will only be working 15 hours a week and stay useless the rest of the time. If you decide to use it as your workstation, rendering will stop the rest of your work. Finally, remember that 7 years is a massive period in the IT industry, and by that time you will have to buy a new processor to compete with modern technologies.

In this render farm cost calculation, we didn’t include the price you would have to pay for electricity, software licenses, and maintenance. In 7 years these additional costs will probably double the overall cost of the farm. Meanwhile, if you are using Megarender, you will spend around $10 and 5 hours on each project. We are constantly upgrading our computers and adding new servers to the farm to make sure it doesn’t become obsolete. New CPUs means less maintenance, which allows us to keep our services cheap.

To summarize

Building your own rendering computer is a major investment and is a smart choice for big studios and teams. But more often than not, the render farm price is just too high to justify buying one. Using an online render farm is much cheaper and more convenient, as you get not only high rendering speeds but also constant technical support. You won’t have to worry about the maintenance, overheating, and power costs. 

Still hesitant? Try our service for free, we offer welcome bonuses to each new user who confirms their phone number. Sign up now and enjoy the new speed of rendering.

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