Watch your frames… If you render on different CPU’s you will have slightly different results due to the ever so slight difference in floating point rounding errors. I had a massive Intel/AMD problem lately… So… stick to one type when you build a render farm. The worst result I had was with a bucket renderer where every second bucket looked different. The frames looked slightly tiled after that. I was looking for quite a while for the root of the problem as every render maker is swearing that this does not happen. Of course it does happen!
I would go so far and make a bet that the same scene rendered on a MAc with ZB WILL have a difference to the same pic rendered on a PC. Hmmmmm would be worth trying… Just for ‘laughs’.
Lemo
Its allways recomended… as I have read… to use at least the same subarch… like AMD or Intel… doesn’t matter really which AMD or which Intel… as long as they are the same brand…
Its suposed that the render should be exactly the same… and i’ll tell you why…
its just math… 1+1 = 2… intel or amd give exactly same results to those computations… and since the rendering engine tells the CPU which calculations to make… the results should be the same on any CPU you choose…
Talk soon,
ArkangelFX
Not true when you’re dealing with floating point numbers. There are small differences that begin to add up, and they could affect your calculations.
And the rounding mechanics… ALU’s are notoriously complex. And actually, all the results are correct. But if you have a rounding error ‘way’ behind the decimal point, and you run through the calculations multiple thousand times a certain value starts to add up slightly different. Resulting in a different value for color or whatever the render engine tried to figure out. Binary representation of floating point numbers and their natural habitat are an entertaining artform themselves. Having programed in assembler in my former life I can only recommend to apreciate the render results and otherwise stay far far away fromthe matter for the sake of mental health.
Lemo
Ive tryied out Mental Ray’s renderer and I ended up using Backburner 
Its really cool… since it can run as service and the users dont even notice their computer is rendering… so i installed 3ds on every single machine at my office… and guess what? ITS AWESOME!!! it runs great! really low rendering times… less than 3hs!!!:o and the frames difference is unnoticable! Im really happy with the results!
Talk soon,
ArkangelFX
Well… i need to buy 2 new comps for net rendering now… wich would be the best buy? Btw, Opteron’s here in Argentina are extreamly difficult to get.
Hope to hear news soon…
ArkangelFX