Rendering Consumes Graphics Card or CPU? How to Optimize 3D Rendering?

The question of whether rendering consumes graphics cards or CPUs depends on the situation. In the case of real-time rendering, the vast majority of rendering is done with the graphics card, or GPU; in the case of offline rendering, mainstream 3D rendering still consumes the CPU. Of course, whether to use CPU rendering or GPU rendering depends mainly on the renderer used. Today, as a leading cloud rendering service provider and render farm in the CG industry, Fox Renderfarm is here to give you a detailed analysis of various rendering situations to help you solve this problem.

Two Types of 3D Rendering: Real-time Rendering and Offline Rendering

Real-time rendering currently has two concepts, one is what you would normally see when playing games on the following devices: computers, tablets, phones, consoles, smart TVs, etc. The images are generated instantly on the hardware used to play the game, and for this kind of rendering, in the vast majority of cases it will be more consuming in terms of GPU arithmetic power. Of course, this can also be done with the help of a real-time rendering cloud platform, which relies on cloud GPU arithmetic power, and users get real-time rendered images pushed to local devices while playing games. The second is the case of using the Eevee renderer, Blender's real-time rendering engine that uses OpenGL to achieve rendering goals while focusing on speed and interactivity. PBR Eevee can be used interactively in the 3D viewport and can also generate high-quality final renders.

Offline rendering (or pre-rendering) can be used for animated movies, visual effects, architectural visualization, etc. In this case, the image is rendered in advance and the result comes out like a movie when presented to the viewer. For example, Cycles is a ray-trace based production render engine for Blender that uses offline rendering techniques to create realistic scenes and high-quality animations.

For offline rendering, both CPU and GPU can be used to render images, but this depends on several factors: the 3D software used to create the image, the size of the scene, the rendering speed, etc., although in the majority of cases CPU rendering is used.

Note: You need to determine whether your project uses CPU rendering or GPU rendering based on the type of rendering you want and the 3D production software and renderer used. It is important to choose the correct rendering method to improve rendering efficiency and optimize 3D rendering.

What is the Relationship Between Cloud Rendering and 3D Rendering?

You should know what 3D rendering is through the explanation above. Then what is cloud rendering that you often hear about? Rendering consumes a lot of computer power, and cloud rendering is equivalent to gathering many computers together to achieve a high level of performance of a supercomputer (like render farm), helping you to render your files on non-local computers for the purpose of accelerating rendering, saving local resources, etc. In short, cloud rendering can accelerate your 3D rendering.

So, whether it's CPU rendering or GPU rendering, if you want to optimize 3D rendering, the most convenient way is to use a cloud rendering farm for batch fast rendering. Fox Renderfarm is an efficient cloud rendering farm that focuses on 3D rendering. If your project is an animation with a large number of frames, you can choose Fox Renderfarm's CPU/GPU rendering services to use multiple or even hundreds of machines for simultaneous rendering according to your needs. If is a project that needs a long rendering time for a single frame, then you can choose 4 or even 9 machines to render a single image in chunks at the same time to get your 3D rendering results efficiently. If you have never used a render farm before, we will also provide a free $25 rendering voucher for you to test, and you can choose whether to continue using Fox Renderfarm's cloud rendering service after the test.