RenderDrive RD3000.(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)

ART's dedicated rendering machine

The RenderDrive is a computer that does one thing and one thing well: It renders. ART's RenderDrive RD3000, which the company refers to as an appliance," is designed as a compact and powerful replacement for the multimachine rendering farms common in most mid-range to high-end production facilities.

The RD3000 is about as toaster-like as you can get. It has two cables--one for power, the other for a 10/100base-T network connection; a power switch; and a floppy disk drive on the back of the unit. Oh, yes, and a tiny LED on the front to let you know whether the power is on or off.

With so few frills on the outside of the box, I had to pop the top and look inside. The guts of the machine were basically a standard-issue Pentium III motherboard, a 7CB SCSI hard disk, 768MB of RAM, a network card, and the aforementioned floppy drive. Plugged into one of the PCI slots, however, is the true heart of the RenderDrive--a card containing not one, not two, but 42 custom-designed processors that do nothing but raytrace. This makes one RenderDrive the equivalent of perhaps a dozen or more PC-based rendering machines.

There are basically three steps to setting up the RenderDrive: Plug it into the wall, then into the network, and configure the machine with its IP address. This last step is done by saving a text file to a floppy disk that is then placed into the RD3000's drive. Once the machine is switched on, it reads this file and automatically connects to the appropriate network.

To render an image, the user installs ART's RenderPipe software plug-in into the 3D application at hand. RenderPipe maintains the network connection to the RenderDrive and also provides an interface to the rendering software--currently a choice of either Discreet's 3D Studio Max or Alias|Wavefront's Maya. It can also render RenderMan RIB files, which must be submitted through a command line interface.

It is important to note that RenderDrive does not run these individual renderers natively. Instead, it translates the information and renders it using its own renderer, which takes advantage of the custom hardware. In this way, RenderDrive is similar to any other third-party rendering program, such as Mental Images' Mental Ray.