A render farm is a cluster of computers (sometimes a few, sometimes thousands) configured to render frames or images in parallel. In traditional rendering workflows, where a single photorealistic image can take hours to compute, render farms divide the work across many machines to reduce wall-clock time. For animations, where each frame is independent, render farms parallelize beautifully — 100 machines render 100 frames simultaneously instead of one after another.
Architectural visualization studios historically depended on either in-house render farms (expensive to buy, maintain, and power) or commercial render farm services (RebusFarm, Garage Farm, Pixel Plow, etc.) that charge by the GHz-hour. A typical large commercial render farm has thousands of CPU cores or GPUs, and competent jobs are priced from a few dollars to a few hundred depending on complexity and time pressure.
AI rendering substantially changes the render-farm equation. Where a single architectural still might have cost $5-50 in render farm time at traditional quality, an AI rendering platform can produce a comparable image in 60 seconds for a fraction of a dollar. For high-end animation and fully physically-correct production work, traditional render farms still have a role; for marketing, conceptual, and portfolio architectural rendering, AI has made the farm largely unnecessary.
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