Can Blender use a GPU's remotely? (over a network) I work for a mid-size company. All employees are Mac based. A colleague and myself have been tasked with modelling and rendering. We will be using Blender / Cycles. The Macs GPUs are rubbish and I would like to know if there is a method we could use to get Blender to use server-mounted GPUs?



To clarify: my colleague and I will be working on iMacs using blender to model and render. The Macs GPU is not up to the task so efficient rendering is not available using just the iMacs. How do we point Blender to recognise the GPUs on our server over the network to perform this task more efficiently?

Thanks
JK
No, there is currently to have a local Blender instance access a remote GPU to make use of it from Cycles. *

There is a network-rendering component to Cycles however this isn't ready for production use, and nobody is actively developing it.

Alternatives:


Use a render farm (send your files to the server).
Use a remote-desktop login to the faster system (using standard remote desktop access).


... though realistically you may be better off to get a computer that supports swapping out graphics cards.



* Probably this has done under some special conditions, however I'm not aware of this being something you can do right now with off-the-shelf software and hardware. And while rCuda exists its only free for academic use, and Cycles would need to be modified to support it.