Advantages of IaaS Render Farm over SaaS Render Farm
[Sponsored article] Many of you have used traditional SaaS Render Farms and are happy with them. They are fast and easy to use, but they have a few big problems. We will compare traditional SaaS Render Farms with the new way of doing it – IaaS Render Farms like MaxCloudON.
Table of Contents
Software compatibility
When SaaS render farms first started only a few 3D animation software existed. Now, out of the different needs of people and the somewhat open-source nature of plugins, many and many versions of the same software are used by designers all around the world, and they are not necessarily compatible with each other. So, if you use some kind of software and plug-in combination that is not supported by many SaaS Render Farms you are limited to a few SaaS providers that can dictate the prices as they wish.
In Iaas Render Farms you are not limited by the software the Saas Render Farms have chosen to support, you can “Bring your own license” (BYOL) and deploy every software combination imaginable. Custom scripting is also available, which in most cases is impossible with SaaS Render Farms.
Price
SaaS Render Farms have complicated pricing based on price per GHz/hour, ob/hour, or in some cases credits, and that converts to something else. The GHz/hour unit can be very very tricky and in some cases impossible to compare and is related to the Render Farm’s processors used. This relates to the processor’s instructions per cycle/clock (IPC). Short said if you compare 3 Ghz on a Pentium 4 processor and 3 Ghz on an Epyc processor – in the second case, the IPC of the Epyc processor is many times higher, which means that for the same clock, the Epic’s 3 Ghz will do many times more work than the Pentium’s 3 Ghz and is not fair to pay the same price for both. That’s why we decided to represent our server’s performance rate in the industry standard of Cinebench points, which represent way more fairly the performance of a specific processor in terms of rendering – and not only. That’s why you need to be very careful when comparing prices on SaaS Render Farms.
In IaaS Render Farms you just pick a node you want, pay in advance for a specific period and use it as you see fit in that period. Later, you always rent more nodes to speed up the rendering process.
Or to put it in numbers – today [09-Mar-2023]* according to Fox Render Farm`s pricing calculator, you will need to spend between $2054 and $4108 to render 5 min – 7200 frames of animation with an average of 5 min render time on a machine with 2 – Rtx3090 video cards. According to them, this will take 36 000 min on “My workstation” (7200×5=36 000 min or 24.2 days), while on their render farm nodes, it will take 24 653 min or 17.12 days.
Note: *Prices are correct as of the date of publishing
On MaxCloudON you can rent a GPU server with 2 – Rtx 3090 for $504, this still will be a bit slower than Fox Render Farm, but you get the server for a full month, which will give you 5.8 days of spare time to make changes or render another project and that is for ¼ of the price. Or if you want to be faster you can rent a server with 4 – RTX 3090 for 14 days for $766 and still have 2 days left. Or you can rent the same server for the entire month for just $892 and have 17 – 18 days to do another project for half the price of the original project in SaaS Render Farm, so 4 times more efficient.
Ease of Use
The traditional SaaS Render Farms have existed for a long time, but things have changed since then. They were created to serve people with less knowledge of networking and how to connect a few computers together to work as one more powerful computer and to be fair, back in the day it was hard to do so. So that is why they created this “one-click” style of use and it works.
IaaS requires a bit more effort to set up, but after the initial setup, it is even better and way more convenient than SaaS. Now, most software comes with a built-in setup menu for that and it is very easy and intuitive to use.
Priority
In some SaaS Render Farms, you pay different prices for priority. This means that if you pay for low priority, you have no ETA on your rendering. In IaaS Render Farms you get full control of the server and you are the sole user, that means that you know exactly when the job will be finished.
Disaster recovery and backup
Iaas Render Farms have one more thing over SaaS Render Farms. As you are essentially renting a dedicated server, you can use it as a backup and disaster recovery tool. During the renting period you can store copies of the project and other data on the server and use it as a backup.
Summary
| SaaS Render Farm | IaaS Render Farm | |
| Initial Set Up | + | |
| License Included in Price | + | |
| Base Price | + | |
| Full Control of Software | + | |
| Easy To Scale | + | |
| Top Priority Every Time | + | |
| Use as Back Up | + |
If you are looking for IaaS Render Farm and long-term partner MaxCloudON can help you with that.
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