Most designers will agree that creation time is much more valuable than rendering time. When a workstation or a local rendering machine is working at 100-percent processing capacity, it is not possible to perform other operations while the computer is processing that data in the background not to mention paying close attention to potential situations such as dropped frame restarting, CPU errors, or worse, crashes. One of the most significant ways that cloud rendering can optimize your workload is by freeing up your design workstation for other tasks, which can significantly save you time and money - especially when rendering multiple frames for animation or motion graphic design. An HDD is fairly slow at writing and reading and even more so are solid state drives (SSD).

Your system will also need to write and read temporary data wherever the existing data is or where the desired destination is on your hard disk drive. Even then, upgrading will ultimately still leave your workstation incapable of performing other operations that rely on RAM or GPU space. Rendering these elements requires a pretty big financial investment in hardware if you are looking to keep your production local. Scenes that are heavy in terms of polycount and sample iteration will also ultimately lead to longer rendering times in a local render.

Extensive high use of RAM can cause frames to drop during a render pass or cause it to render too slowly if your machine does not have enough memory to complete the task.

What exactly is taking up all of that time? Rendering locally on your workstation involves intense RAM usage, GPU usage, and disk space for storage. When either using unoptimized geometry in scenes or polygon-heavy models in your final render, variables such as these and more will ultimately increase the amount of time and processor power necessary to complete a single render. We’ve pointed out in the past about how locally rendering 2D or 3D projects for animation and film is a very time-consuming and computation-intensive process.

Fusion 360 local render