My name is David Sokol, and I'm the founder of rentaflop (https://rentaflop.com). We're a crowdsourced render farm aimed at making Blender rendering fast and affordable.
If you've used Blender, then I'm sure you've experienced the pain of waiting around for your animations to render. You've probably even had to sacrifice the quality of your work to reduce your render times. I've been there too.
If you're like me, then you're also disappointed with the alternative solutions: spending thousands of dollars on graphics cards or using prohibitively expensive cloud render farms to get fast render times. Our solution to this dilemma is to leverage low opportunity cost hardware from around the world to allow Blender artists to render their projects quickly, affordably, and without compromising on quality. Since most graphics card owners aren't utilizing their hardware to do valuable work 24/7, we provide them with a way to make money without lifting a finger, while lowering the cost curve for 3D rendering.
We're currently doing a public beta. If you'd like to try us, check out our site (https://rentaflop.com) and render your Blender project quickly and affordably! If you're a graphics card owner who wants to help Blender artists while earning money, reach out to support@rentaflop.com and we'll help you get set up.
We posted about our private beta on HN a few weeks ago. If you'd like, you can check out the discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32299674).
Please leave a comment below, we'd love to hear your thoughts :)
Your pricing is $0.0019 per Octane hour. IIUC, that means that an hour of time on an RTX3070 - scoring 400 - costs $0.76. Cost of an RTX3070 right now is about $550 on Amazon and with a TDP of 220W and an average price (in the US) of $0.15/kWh, the total cost will be $550 + <hours> * $0.15 * 0.22.
Given that, the break even is 757h, which is unexpectedly high.
Do you think your pricing is sustainable?
EDIT: To be clear, I'm aware of the model of using "spare" GPUs, my calculations were just for a point of comparison. What I'm asking is whether, with such low pricing, the company will have enough income to be long-term profitable.
For artists/studios who do a ton of rendering, it may be worth it for them to buy up many graphics cards and create their own private render farm. However, this requires considerable up-front cost as well as a lot of technical expertise, which many simply don't have. For a lot of them, it's a much better deal to render with rentaflop and not have the headache and cost of managing hardware.
Considering that Blender is being used more and more for high production shots, you’ll be happy services like this exist. At least until you release your feature.
Keep going. Folks who can build their own render farm, will, but the vast majority of artists won’t.
Recruiting spare gamers' GPUs is one thing - those people bought the GPU anyway, so as long as you pay more than they pay for power, they're happy - but I imagine that's a relatively small pool of GPUs.
At some point, you'll run out of those people, so I guess what I'm asking is whether the price you charge now is high enough that investors could profitably build and run their own "mining" hardware , while you still get enough of a cut to run your service.
I think you're kind of missing the point. Most non-professional artists (which there's a lot of!) won't need to come close to the break even point. When I was doing modeling and speed painting in school, I probably used about 80 render hours a year on our farm. I never "went" professional, but I can imagine that smaller shops probably aren't spending that much time doing deliverable renders. I bet a lot of small shops with a small farm under the desk are going to sign up to be providers for this as well.
Not to mention, you're talking about one GPU :) That's very slow. You really need to consider that for complex scenes, having twelve GPUs running for five minutes is way more convenient than one GPU running for an hour. Now, suddenly, that changes the math significantly - you're talking about buying 4x gpus (and the "sleds" required to run them - another $600 or so).
People who already bought 3070s and would otherwise not be using them are providing the compute, so they don't need a realistic breakeven on an entire 3070. They essentially need to breakeven on electricity for the owner.
Also they're not charging .0019 per Octane hour, it's per _ Octanebench hour_. One GPU can provide more than 1 Octanebench hour of compute.
Compare their pricing to the rest of the market and you'll see it's not unreasonably cheap: https://garagefarm.net/blog/garagefarm-net-adds-gpu-renderin...
The GPU market is beyond saturated, with prices crashing. There are predictions of new 3090's being $500 in 6 months as NVIDIA and their partners get desperate to offload 3000 series inventory to make room for 4000 series cards.
Everyone and their cousin has a gaming PC now and even if a service like this were to take off, they'd have no shortage of suppliers (and competitors) and thus prices will plunge.
I can't see this being a sustainable business model past 6-9 months from now.
Also for commercial production use many VFX houses have contracts that don't let them send the assets out of house.
This would be great for people doing styles that don't need a ton of assets tho, like procedural-heavy (geonodes) scenes.
But as a hobbyist, I could definitely use something like this, and I'll check it out!
There's no point to this post other than a trip down memory lane. I wish you the best with this project!
Was an awesome idea but I haven’t really been following that space for a long while.
With that being said, there are plenty of Blender projects that don't have this requirement, and we aim to focus on these types of projects.
Mining bitcoin feels gross to me (no flame wars please)... but sharing GPUs with artists seems way more altruistic.
It sounds like this is a cryptocurrency miner plus rendering farm, and participants will be paid in cryptocurrencies?
I did some testing for a version of such a service in 2017 and it was determined the typical GPU miner configuration using x1 PCIe risers reduced I/O throughout and therefore performance of GPU hardware to the point of being practically useless for anything other than mining.
I have no experience with the characteristics of rendering, I/O, etc but it seems this also applies.
Seti@home meets Blender.
I wonder if that would work for machine learning...
There are limitations that make it difficult to set up their machines as infrastructure however.
https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com
Does anyone else know of any others? Thanks!
I agree that I'd like to be able to do this without having to reboot and set things up before starting to mine/render.
May I ask why using a thumb drive is a deal breaker? Typically the setup for our software only takes around 15 minutes to complete, and we can have someone from our support team help walk you through it.
There's no need for coordination in that case.
how much is a graphics card on offer currently? say RTX 3090ti or 3050ti or something else for example?
$0.0019 is not explanatory without giving examples.
can you improve your pricing page to include such details?
like say
$0.0019 in terms of graphics cards mean
RTX 3090 is $x/hour.
RTX 1660 is $x/hour.
titan x is $x/hour.
Using this benchmark and our pricing of $.0019 per Octane benchmark hour, a 3090 would cost about $1.24/hr. The important thing to remember, and the reason we don't display our pricing like this, is that you aren't buying raw graphics card power from rentaflop or renting a single GPU. Instead, you're paying to have your Blender project rendered by dozens or even hundreds of graphics cards in parallel.
It seems to me that you are attempting to position yourself mostly via your pricing while you might have much better chances highlighting ease of use. Purely price driven users do have better alternatives but those driven not entirely by price but also convenience is who you want to capture.
