i am continuing to try every permutation possible, but so far all my Crowdrenders have been slower, in fact, much slower than using my single main machine. i am using today's build of blender 2.80. i plan to try it in 2.79, in case the problem is to do with 2.80.
Machine specs:
master: i7 6700K + GTX 1080 in hybrid mode
node: P37 Gigabyte i7 4720HQ + GTX 970M
both machines set to CUDA.
render object: a single monkey with glass shader on a plane.
I have excactly the same issue here. The file is the demo BMW27 from blender's website (blender 3.0).
A 60 frames animation (just a camera movement) is rendered as following:
Master PC (Angry Beast): 10'24" (optix only GPU rendering)
3 nodes (Master and 2 slaves): 14'10" (slaves on cuda only GPU rendering)
In the attachement I have a comparison list of every setting I used (including load balancing) on both Master and all Slaves with their respectively times
3 nodes cannot beat the master PC with a huge different
My thoughts are, and please verify if true.
Since 1 frame is rendered in 10sec on the Master PC, the time the file needs to be distributed and loaded to each node adds an extra time that has nothing to do with the actual render time. What I mean is that if all nodes has started the rendering at the same time the final rendering time should be lower than 10sec. Now, if a scene takes 1min for 1 frame on the Master PC, probably the nodes rendering would be faster in total as the distribution time would be so small that it won't make much difference.
Of course this is a thought, I haven't test a large file but please if you can provide a solution, a tip or a verification of the above it would be great.
Thanks.