2018 has been a full year, with a lot of work, and a lot of satisfaction, too. The farm has been running 24/7 from the first second of January until the last one in December, rendering your work. As usual, we’ve gathered some facts and numbers and we’re sharing them with you. As you’re trusting us with your projects, we want to give you a bit of insight into what it takes to always be ready to render.
Our platform is continuously developing, even if it’s not visible from the outside. There’s a lot going on in the back-end and on the infrastructure side – things that you don’t see, but which are contributing to the overall stability and performance of our farm. We don’t talk much about it, but in 2018, we made on average an update to the platform every 3 days. Most of the updates were small, but there were a number of big ones, including:
- The yearly option for RenderStreet One, for those of you that need a long-term rendering solution at an even lower cost;
- Payments with cryptocurrency, to give you a chance to put your coins to good use;
- A ‘multi-user’ type of account, so companies and studios with many users can have better control over their accounts and spending;
- An upgraded internal caching system for faster and more efficient job management. This has significantly cut the startup times for larger jobs, both on the monthly and on the pay-per-use plans;
- Support for Blender 2.80 (since its alpha version), including support for the new
EEVEE render engine – being the first render farm supporting EEVEE (and at the time of writing this article, the only one); - An infrastructure upgrade to add custom GPU servers for EEVEE rendering – at a lower price compared to our regular GPU nodes;
- Support for Modo 12.2, including the Modo denoiser on GPU. Again, we were the first render farm to support the Modo denoiser (and once again, at the time of writing this article, the only one) ;
- Another infrastructure upgrade to add a different kind of custom GPU servers to support the denoiser;
- And a final upgrade to bring online the new GPU servers for Cycles. While announced a few days ago, working on this feature started a couple of months back, in November.
In addition to that, we have a couple of big updates in work as we speak. One I hope you’ll love is the redesign of the job control panel to make it even more friendly, with added features based on your suggestions and requests. We’ll be looking for beta testers for it soon, so get in touch if you’d be interested!
In terms of activity, we’ve been growing the past year as well, and we implemented a number of custom solutions for industry partners and schools. The figures speak for themselves:
- 99.5% uptime. A bit lower than our usual average, but sometimes computers have a mind of their own. Still, it’s a very good number and you can be sure that we’re here when you need a fast render. No advance notice or scheduling is necessary, we always have the resources to complete your renders in time with our on-demand and Studio plans;
- 11.5 million frames and 50% more render hours rendered with our unique monthly plan RenderStreet One, both with Blender and with Modo. This plan has been running continuously for the past 4 years now. And after all this time, the ‘this has been a lifesaver’ emails are still coming in and making us happy every time we receive them;
- Over 99% success rate in job delivery. This has become our trademark figure. In fact, in 2018 the number was 99.9%, but hey, we’re not bragging 😉
- More than 400 render nodes allocated to a single project, to meet the client’s deadline. This means crunching an hour of effective render time on our servers every 9 seconds!
I could keep the list going, but I’m going to stop here. Instead, I want to let your experience with us speak for itself. We’re committed to making your life easier as an artist and to providing you with the best service possible. We’ve been working hard for that, and we’ll work harder in 2019, too. We’re proud of our ‘most recommended’ status, and, with your continued support, we’ll do even better this year!
Marius Iatan
CEO, RenderStreet
