BOXX Introduces 2 New Rendering Solutions

The BOXX renderPRO1. (Image courtesy of BOXX.)

BOXX has announced the release of two new sidekick systems with the aim of dumping the render farm.

Rendering has become a staple part of an engineer’s workflow. Renders are used to pitch ideas to clients, sell products to customers and even convince decision makers within a company that a product, or even product line, is worth marshalling the resources to produce. But while rendering has become a larger part of the engineering workload, little has been done to decrease rendering’s ravenous appetite for computational cycles.

For the most part, companies have solved this problem by either having a local render farm, which is a collection of the machines that a company owns tied together into a network resulting in increased computer power, or an external farm that lives in the cloud. But while both of those solutions have their advantages, they’re also burdened by some heavy baggage.

To begin with, local render farms can only be used when a system is idle. If a designer in your office is using a machine, its computation cycles are snatched from the farm’s reserves, making the network less powerful. Because of that reason, most local render farms are busiest at night when no one is at the office.

While offsite options like cloud-based rendering eliminate the productivity slumps that a local farm suffers from, offsite options can be expensive.

So, how does an engineer find a better solution for his or her rendering? Well, BOXX thinks they have the solution in its two new products, the renderPRO 1 and renderPRO 2.

According to BOXX, the renderPRO 1 is a total computer system that supports an Intel Xeon processor with up to 18 cores, 64 GB of DDR4-2133 memory and a state-of-the-art cooling system. In addition to these features, the renderPRO1 is also notable for the components it leaves behind, namely, anything that isn’t a hard disk, CPU or RAM. In the end, the renderPRO 1 is a large-bodied, frame-gobbling sidekick that can unload an office’s rendering burden.

The BOXX renderPRO2. (Image courtesy of BOXX.)

The second offering in BOXX’s new release is the renderPRO 2. Unlike the renderPRO 1, the renderPRO 2 is a miniature machine, but its size doesn’t define its power. Despite being small enough to sit atop a workstation, the renderPRO 2 will carry an Intel Xeon processor with up to 36 cores, can add a GPU to the mix and can be outfitted with up to 128 GB of RAM.

Although BOXX is pushing forward with the local render farm strategy (I mean, selling computers is its game), I think that the future of rendering, whether it be for engineering or an animation studio, will be in the cloud. There are just far too many computational fonts that people can tap into to process their images. Today, we’re still using servers located in Whereversburg to churn through our graphics, but tomorrow, we might be renting out CPU time on our cellphones and watches to strangers building graphics. Whatever the case may be, computational resources are still going to be scarce in a world that loves its digital images.