With the cost of electricity going in the direction it is, I don't think this will be worthwhile for anyone in the UK.
Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#42According to this page: https://portal.rentaflop.com/blog/hosting It sounds like this is a cryptocurrency miner plus rendering farm, and participants will be paid in cryptocurrencies?
Many of our early hardware providers (hosts) are crypto miners, as they often have many graphics cards. As a result, we pay our hosts in crypto in order to attract them to our network. Our software, rentaflop miner, doesn't behave like a normal miner, however. Its goal is to take existing cryptocurrency miners who mine currencies like Ethereum and give their hardware more useful work such as rendering.
Useful work, fantastic !
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#43A long time ago, I worked on Renderfarm.fi, which was like what you're proposing but free. I was just an extremely junior developer working on the front end. The volunteer computing system itself was based on BOINC. I recall it was quite the effort to keep it running. If I remember right we rendered everything multiple times on different nodes to make sure that jobs weren't being faked.
There's no point to this post other than a trip down memory lane. I wish you the best with this project!
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#44The big question is the pricing and whether it really does make sense to pay for your service instead of purchasing hardware. 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 + * $0.15 * 0.22. Giv…
> Cost of an RTX3070 right now is about $550 on Amazon
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.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we take measures to secure and bolster data privacy, it's possible for hosts to be malicious. As a result, you should never run workloads containing sensitive or confidential information on rentaflop. In the future, we may decide to offer a special service that renders your work only on rentaflop-owned hardware. With that being said, there are plenty of Blender projects that don't have this requirement, and we…
But David, almost all production work requires NDA and IP protection. This is something you should focus on if you want studio work to utilize your service.
It's not really clear how this works from their site but I think they're basically just sending your raw blend files to random users without any protection or guarantee, legal or technical, that either the blends or the renders will be deleted afterwards. That's going to go down well with my clients. "What the prototype renders were leaked by some random teenager from Birmingham? No, I've no idea how they got hold of them. Honest guv!"
Ah well time to add another clause the contract I use when subcontracting, something like "I affirm that I will not make use of Rentaflop during the fulfilment of this contract" should do it.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#46I'm trying to compile a list of all crowd-sourced compute platforms that aren't exclusively for crypto purposes. So far I have: https://vast.ai https://rentaflop.com https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com Does anyone else know of any others? Thanks!
https://sonm.com/
Have you tried this? Do you know how well it works?
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
But David, almost all production work requires NDA and IP protection. This is something you should focus on if you want studio work to utilize your service.
It's not really clear how this works from their site but I think they're basically just sending your raw blend files to random users without any protection or guarantee, legal or technical, that either the blends or the renders will be deleted afterwards. That's going to go down well with my clients. "What the prototype renders were leaked by some random teenager from Birmingham? No, I've no idea how they got hold of…
I think it's pretty clear that the service isn't for professionals. Possibly too niche to sustain a business.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for your question! We believe our pricing is competitive and tends to be one of our strong points, along with our speed. We charge considerably less than most other rendering services. Our farm will also render your projects much faster than a single RTX 3070 can render them. 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…
What I mean isn't whether the price is competitive, I believe it absolutely is, what I mean is can you run a profitable and scalable company with that kind of pricing? 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…
Ah, I understand now. I believe there are enough private GPU owners around to sustain and scale rentaflop for many years to come. For instance, did you know there were around 10 million GPUs mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency at its peak? Our current prices allow our hosts to earn ~10x what crypto mining pays whenever they're processing rendering tasks for rentaflop. There are millions more GPUs owned by gamers, AI hobbyists, businesses, etc. that we hope to leverage to make 3D rendering more accessible to artists. If we manage to attract even a tiny fraction of these, we stand a chance at becoming the fastest and most affordable render farm on the planet.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#49According to this page: https://portal.rentaflop.com/blog/hosting It sounds like this is a cryptocurrency miner plus rendering farm, and participants will be paid in cryptocurrencies?
Many of our early hardware providers (hosts) are crypto miners, as they often have many graphics cards. As a result, we pay our hosts in crypto in order to attract them to our network. Our software, rentaflop miner, doesn't behave like a normal miner, however. Its goal is to take existing cryptocurrency miners who mine currencies like Ethereum and give their hardware more useful work such as rendering.
Are you experiencing significant performance penalties due to miner use of 1 lane PCIe risers?
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.
Re: Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality
#50Rent-a-flop? That already exists and is called Amazon Prime.