I’m curious about what kind of machine setup is most efficient for Swarm renderfarming. What’s the most similar benchmark we can compare it with? Does it benefit from GPU power and additional RAM as well? These are probably developer questions but I hope some other folks can answer as well.
Basically, I’m considering building a budget AMD FX system, since those CPUs are so good at crunching numbers for how much they cost.
bumping my thread after editing it
Only CPU and memory matter. Everything in Lightmass is multithreaded, so the more cores, the faster it will build. However, the more cores you have, the more memory Lightmass will use as each thread is working on something different. A large level can use 16+Gb with 32 threads, smaller levels will be more like 2Gb.
For benchmark go with one of the multithreaded offline raytracer ones.
You might want to try the logistics of setting up your own Swarm network before buying any hardware, to make sure it will work. Swarm can be inconsistent with connection issues and different network types.