How Long Does Cloud Rendering Take to Render an Image?

Long local rendering times may prevent you from delivering your project before the deadline. At this point, seeking help from cloud rendering is a very good choice, but you may be wondering: how long does cloud rendering take to render an image? Is cloud rendering fast? The best render farm in the CG industry, Fox Renderfarm is here to answer the questions.

In fact, the underlying logic of cloud rendering and our local rendering is the same, both rely on computer arithmetic to provide rendering, so if you want to judge how long the cloud rendering renders a picture, you can first self-check what your computer configuration is.

How Long Does it Take to Render an Image Using Cloud Rendering? Is Cloud Rendering Fast?

Typically, the projects that require cloud rendering are mostly CPU-intensive 3D projects created with software such as 3ds Max or Maya. CPU rendering generally depends on the number of threads and cores. Therefore, you can first check the number of threads or cores in your computer and the average time it takes to render an image locally. Then, you can compare the specifications (number of threads/cores) of the cloud rendering machines available in the market to estimate approximately how long it would take to render an image using cloud rendering.

Of course, machine configurations vary in quality, so estimating the rendering speed of a cloud rendering platform in this way is not absolutely accurate because not all cores are the same. Different CPUs of the same brand, even if they have the same number of cores and core speed, can still have different rendering speeds.

So, the method we mentioned can only serve as a reference. The most accurate way is to register an account and test the rendering speed of various cloud rendering platforms using the 3D file of the same image. This will make it clear how long it takes to render an image on each platform.

After all we've discussed, I believe everyone should have a certain understanding of the rendering speed of cloud rendering platforms. However, the biggest advantage of cloud rendering in terms of speed is actually the ability to network multiple machines to simultaneously render a single image and schedule multiple machines for batch rendering of multiple images.

Taking Fox Renderfarm cloud rendering platform as an example, you can upload an image and choose to simultaneously render it in blocks using multiple machines, which is much faster than rendering sequentially on your local machine. Moreover, when you have an animation task that requires rendering multiple images, your local computer can only render them one by one, whereas a cloud rendering platform can schedule 10, 100, or even 1000 machines to render the task simultaneously, resulting in rendering efficiency tens or even hundreds of times higher than local rendering.

So it's still recommended that you can try cloud rendering on your own, and various render farm platforms have free test amounts you can claim. Like Fox Renderfarm offers a $25 free trial to new users, enough to test a small project.