Has there been any testing to run Blender+Crowdrender with multiple instances on the same machine? One instance being a CPU render and another instance being a GPU render?
Just curious if there would be any limitations or performance gains.
Thanks for all that you do.
Hi Eric,
Yes, I do this regularly for testing purposes. Generally you are better off leaving at least one CPU thread free (you can do this from the render node settings, little gears icon next to the render node in the Crowdrender panel, in Blender's render properties) for the CPU node, and making sure to turn off hybrid rendering for both the CPU and GPU render nodes.
Note: this is only really possible without hacking stuff on the client/master machine.
Also note that you can only create one other instance other than the one running in Blender's foreground process, so you need to use the local instance (called "This machine" in the crowdrender panel, and sits at the top of the list of nodes), and you then add a new node, and give it the same computer name as the machine you are on. Then connect to it.
Once you have both "this machine", and the other new node connected, you can adjust their settings to make one a CPU only, and the other GPU, its not important which one uses which device. Just make sure you don't allocate all the CPU threads to the render on the CPU only device, and make sure you ONLY have GPU enabled on the other.
This is important since the CPU needs to have at least one thread free to service the GPU. You can adjust the amount of threads given to the CPU device in the render node settings, again, these are located in a menu next to each render node in the Crowdrender panel, accessible by clicking the gears icon.
Hope this helps :)