The RenderStreet One subscription has proven to be a precious tool for artists and studios needing to render large volumes with low budgets or have a rendering solution with fixed costs to help forecast company expenses. The plan has been going strong since its launch in 2017 and has delivered tens of millions of frames since then.

As you already know, we are periodically upgrading our hardware and we make every effort to offer the best possible cost/performance ratio to our users. We have upgraded the On Demand servers multiple times in the past and now it’s time to refresh the machines for the RenderStreet One plan as well.

The new machines have been in beta-testing for a while and we are now rolling them out in production gradually. They are faster (approximately twice as fast as the old ones, on average) and have twice the RAM (64 GB compared to 32 GB for the outgoing machines). The storage has been also upgraded to the fastest NVME solution available currently, for faster loading of the scenes. This means that you can now render larger, more demanding projects, and deliver them faster.

2020 is the year for the big releases on RenderStreet. Our new interface has been officially launched in April, and at the time I was promising more upgrades soon.

It’s now time to talk about the next one, which brings faster transfers and faster file processing for your renders. More specifically, this is about upgrades to our infrastructure, for both our core and our auxiliary (file management) services. Your file uploads and downloads will be faster, your movie previews and thumbnails will be generated more rapidly, the archives will be ready for download in a shorter time and the uploads to your cloud accounts will also be faster.

This is quite a large project (and also a critical one), as it involves code, hardware and networking changes. This means it took time to plan it, develop it and implement it. We are currently in the second phase of its release, and everything works as planned. As of now, two new features are officially available:

We have been working for a while now on reinventing our job management interface. You are spending a fair amount of time using it, and making things easier for you is one of our top priorities. So we started a new project, that resulted in a totally redesigned interface, created from scratch. The project has reached the RC phase now, and I’m excited to share it with you!

The main goal of the new interface is to help you be more productive. We analyzed the way you are using our service, and based on the data, we put emphasis on certain areas and made some functionality easier to access. Plus, there are a number of extra features that will help you focus on what is important: creating and delivering projects. And of course, the new interface adapts to the device you are using, from a phone to a large desktop screen.

At the beginning of 2019, we were announcing an upgrade in our GPU line-up. The new GPUs at the time (Nvidia® Tesla K80) came with almost double speed compared to the old ones, and three times more memory.

Now it’s time for a new upgrade. We are jumping forward three hardware architecture generations, from Kepler to Volta, and we’re powering new machines with Nvidia® V100 Tensor Core GPUs. The new GPUs are, as described by Nvidia, “The Most Advanced Data Center GPU Ever Built” and bring even more speed and 16 GB of RAM for your renders. As with the previous upgrade, there is no increase in the price you are paying for our services – this is a free performance upgrade. The new machines are live at this moment (in fact, they have been live for a while now, introduced gradually in production). And we’ve run the numbers for you, to see exactly how much better they are.