A bit of a niche topic but am wondering if anyone has suggestions. We have a fairly small architectural design and visualization company that is growing a bit this year and I'm looking for the best tech solution.
Currently we have a handful of people who are basically using their computer of choice for Sketchup, Revit and V-Ray. However, we are going to need to add a few more people and I'm looking for the most cost effective (and efficient) way to allow everyone to work on their models on their computers but also have a way to access some additional "computer power" when they have a highly complex or large model and particularly when they need to render a complex view.
Most of our rendering work is currently performed by 2 people and they are using MacBook Pros (I believe the i9 processor, 64GB RAM, not sure which graphics card but I know it has 8GB of memory, and SSD storage.) Some renders can take over an hour on this computer (others only a few seconds, but it's really inefficient when we need to produce several renderings from a complex model and it basically ties up his computer all day)
Switching to a desktop is a non-starter because one person in particular is working and traveling routinely. I also really don't want to have to buy a desktop and laptop for every person. And I also don't want to buy 2 laptops for each person to use the other if one is stuck rendering all day.
Is there a solution where we could buy a super powerful workstation (like the ThinkStation P920 with multiple processors, tons of ram and multiple graphics cards) and offload the heavy lifting rendering work to that? I've read that Remote Desktop and virtual machine instances don't tend to work well with programs that need heavy graphics card use and don't really want to spend $15k on a super computer just to test it out!
Does anyone have experience with something like this?
Currently we have a handful of people who are basically using their computer of choice for Sketchup, Revit and V-Ray. However, we are going to need to add a few more people and I'm looking for the most cost effective (and efficient) way to allow everyone to work on their models on their computers but also have a way to access some additional "computer power" when they have a highly complex or large model and particularly when they need to render a complex view.
Most of our rendering work is currently performed by 2 people and they are using MacBook Pros (I believe the i9 processor, 64GB RAM, not sure which graphics card but I know it has 8GB of memory, and SSD storage.) Some renders can take over an hour on this computer (others only a few seconds, but it's really inefficient when we need to produce several renderings from a complex model and it basically ties up his computer all day)
Switching to a desktop is a non-starter because one person in particular is working and traveling routinely. I also really don't want to have to buy a desktop and laptop for every person. And I also don't want to buy 2 laptops for each person to use the other if one is stuck rendering all day.
Is there a solution where we could buy a super powerful workstation (like the ThinkStation P920 with multiple processors, tons of ram and multiple graphics cards) and offload the heavy lifting rendering work to that? I've read that Remote Desktop and virtual machine instances don't tend to work well with programs that need heavy graphics card use and don't really want to spend $15k on a super computer just to test it out!
Does anyone have experience with something like this?