Conductor on CoreWeave Benchmarks: In Summary

  • CoreWeave offers a broader range of more modern, performant NVIDIA GPUs than other major cloud providers, contributing to improved performance, faster runtime, and lower overall costs for rendering on Conductor.

  • GPU benchmarks: CoreWeave’s NVIDIA GPU-powered instances are consistently more performant than instances available from the other cloud providers on Conductor, resulting in significant cost and time savings for artists and studios.

  • CPU benchmarks: CoreWeave CPU-only instances on Conductor are more cost-effective than comparable instances from the other cloud.

Conductor customers can now access a broader, more powerful range of compute resources on CoreWeave for rendering visual effects (VFX), animation, motion graphics, and design projects, including for large-scale workloads requiring GPU acceleration.

Impact on Rendering on Conductor for Artists

Earlier this summer, we ran some benchmarks to compare rendering on CoreWeave through Conductor versus rendering on one of the biggest worldwide cloud providers through Conductor. These tests ran on all currently available instance offerings for Conductor customers. The scene used is a very simple Universal Scene Description (USD) scene rendered with a significant amount of rays per pixel to lengthen the time taken to complete the task.

Controls:

  • Instance types for GPU workloads: Cinema4D/Redshift 3.5.14
  • Instance types for CPU workloads: Cinema4D/Arnold 4.6.3.0

Tests (CoreWeave vs. other cloud provider):

  • Runtime for on-demand GPU instances
  • Job cost for on-demand and spot GPU instances
  • Comparable GPU instances on a major cloud provider and CoreWeave
  • CPU instances (runtime and job cost combined in one chart)

Rendering on Conductor: CoreWeave vs. General Cloud Provider

CoreWeave features:

  1. More modern, performant GPU resources
  2. Consistent economical pricing
  3. Availability vs. spot instances
  4. Fast instance spin-up time

Available GPU Resources

GPU instance types available on Conductor from CoreWeave leverage newer architecture from NVIDIA than those made available from the other cloud provider.

The key differences here are optionality and GPU types. With more GPU SKUs, CoreWeave helps you better match your workloads' compute needs with the available instance type, which can help you avoid overpaying for unused compute. Artists and studios using Conductor on CoreWeave will have access to the latest NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture on demand, including NVIDIA RTX A5000 cards.

Pricing

CoreWeave offers economical pricing for compute resources on CoreWeave. The price does not fluctuate based on demand. CoreWeave also has no egress charges, so you can easily move data between regions or even cloud providers at no cost and with no long-term agreements.

Availability vs. Spot Instances

Spot instances are only available on the other cloud provider. Spot instances are spare computing resources offered by cloud service providers at significantly reduced prices compared to on-demand instances, but with the possibility of termination with short notice.

CoreWeave’s compute is generally priced at or lower than the other cloud provider’s spot equivalent, with a guarantee that your workload will complete without interruption.

Instance Spin-Up Time

As the charts in the benchmark section will show, runtimes for CoreWeave instances are faster than comparable instances from the other cloud provider, which can in part be attributed to faster instance spin-up time, more responsive autoscaling, and containerization on CoreWeave.

Benchmarks

We ran a total of 39 different instances, six for the other cloud and 33 for CoreWeave, each with different combinations of GPU types and the amount of GPUs, CPUs, and memory used.

Runtime for All On-Demand GPU Instances

In the chart above, you see that all CoreWeave instances (blue) had a faster runtime (minutes) than all instances from the other cloud (gray). The fastest general cloud instance required slightly more time than the slowest CoreWeave instance.

Job Cost for All On-Demand & Spot GPU Instances

The first chart compares the price to run on-demand instances on the general cloud provider against on-demand instances on CoreWeave. The second chart compares the price to run spot instances on a general cloud against on-demand instances on CoreWeave.

Comparable GPU Instances: General Cloud vs. CoreWeave

The two charts above look at the runtime and job costs for two instance types that use only one GPU. For two categories, runtime and on-demand job cost, CoreWeave outperforms the general cloud.

These two charts above compare instances that used four GPUs instead of one with CoreWeave outpacing the general cloud provider in both runtime and job costs.

CPU-Only Instances on Conductor

We ran a total of 10 different CPU-only instances, five for the general cloud provider and five for CoreWeave. The charts below show CPU-only instances performance comparisons.

The chart above shows runtime (in minutes), on-demand job cost, and spot job costs for all 10 instances.

Looking Ahead

At CoreWeave and Conductor, our engineering teams are continually benchmarking to find better compute solutions. By the end of this year, we aim to make CoreWeave’s premium compute AMD Epyc Milan CPU as well as Intel Xeon v4 and Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs available to Conductor users, increasing performance at better prices.

Our teams are looking to build solutions that help studios manage the full cycle of cloud workflow requirements, integrating features to optimize user experiences.