QUESTION: Ideal hardware to perform headless renders with Shady?

I'd like to purchase a new headless Linux box with a 3D accelerator to speed up some Shady renders. I plan to ssh or chrome remote desktop into the machine and have it run (very cooly) in my basement. The workflow would be something like: ssh into the box, run a shell script to render with Shady, come back in a n hour, and finally pick up the mp4s post-render to use them elsewhere.

For a modest budget (best rendering speedup per dollar) on this new machine, could you suggest the ideal...

platform:

• intel
• amd
• arm64

linux distro

• debian
• ubuntu
• other?

3d video card:

• NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3080
• AMD Radeon

Graphics Drivers:

• open source
• proprietary binaries, like nVidia provides for Ubuntu

...to speed up Shady renders in this kind of headless workflow:

export EGL_PLATFORM=surfaceless

shady \
  -i gravity.glsl \
  -ofmt rgb24 \
  -g 3840x2160 \
  -f 60 \
| ffmpeg \
  -f rawvideo -pixel_format rgb24 -video_size 3840x2160 \
  -framerate 60 -t 3600 -i - out.mp4

If it is at all possible to just plug an external GPU (eGPU) into a Raspberry Pi 4B to massively speed up a Shady render... this would my preferred hardware platform!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! @polyfloyd

V/R,
@589290

[polyfloyd]

Sorry, I'm not able to help you here! I have used my integrated Intel GPU for the last few years :)

Rendering on a Raspberry Pi would be cool though. It has a GPU which can probably be utilized. If you are going to run some experiments I would be interested in hearing about how far you get.