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Conductor on X-Cloud Rendering Benchmarks for GPU and CPU Instances

Conductor on X-Cloud Benchmarks: In Summary X-Cloud offers a broader range of more modern, performant NVIDIA GPUs than other major cloud providers, contributing to improved performance, faster runtime, and lower overall costs for rendering on Conductor. GPU benchmarks: X-Cloud NVIDIA GPU-powered instances are consistently more performant than instances available from the other cloud providers on...

Conductor on X-Cloud Rendering Benchmarks for GPU and CPU Instances

Conductor on X-Cloud Benchmarks: In Summary

  • X-Cloud offers a broader range of more modern, performant NVIDIA GPUs than other major cloud providers, contributing to improved performance, faster runtime, and lower overall costs for rendering on Conductor.
  • GPU benchmarks: X-Cloud NVIDIA GPU-powered instances are consistently more performant than instances available from the other cloud providers on Conductor, resulting in significant cost and time savings for artists and studios.
  • CPU benchmarks: X-Cloud CPU-only instances on Conductor are more cost-effective than comparable instances from the other cloud.

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Conductor customers can now access a broader, more powerful range of compute resources on X-Cloud for rendering visual effects (VFX), animation, motion graphics, and design projects, including for large-scale workloads requiring GPU acceleration.

How does this impact rendering on Conductor for artists from a time and cost perspective?

Earlier this summer, we ran some benchmarks to compare rendering on X-Cloud through Conductor versus rendering on one of the biggest worldwide cloud providers through Conductor. These tests ran on all currently available instance offerings for Conductor customers. The scene used is a very simple Universal Scene Description (USD) scene rendered with a significant amount of rays per pixel to lengthen the time taken to complete the task.

Here’s a snapshot of what we tested:

Controls:

  • Instance types for GPU workloads: Cinema4D/Redshift 3.5.14
  • Instance types for CPU workloads: Cinema4D/Arnold 4.6.3.0

Tests (X-Cloud vs. other cloud provider):

  • Runtime for on-demand GPU instances
  • Job cost for on-demand and spot GPU instances
  • Comparable GPU instances on a major cloud provider and X-Cloud
  • CPU instances (runtime and job cost combined in one chart)

Before we dive into the benchmarks, let’s quickly compare X-Cloud vs. the other cloud provider so that you can better analyze the results.

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Rendering on Conductor: X-Cloud vs. General Cloud Provider

There are a few fundamental differences between X-Cloud and this major cloud provider that help explain the large gaps in performance in the following benchmarks section.

X-Cloud features:

  1. More modern, performant GPU resources
  2. Consistent economical pricing
  3. Availability vs. spot instances
  4. Fast instance spin-up time