You may have noticed recently that your GPU renders on RenderStreet have been finishing faster. You don’t need to check your samples or resolution, it’s because of a new kind of server we’ve been silently testing in the past week. Besides putting the hardware online for real-world tests, we’ve also run some of the standard benchmarks, and here is the first good news:
That’s right, the new servers offer twice the performance over the current ones. Since the 4k format is getting more and more popular, we’ve also run 4k renders of the same benchmarks, and the performance improvement is in the same range. The new servers run NVidia Grid technology, and each of them has two K520 boards (for a total of 4 GPUs). We’ve tested them, and they are fully compatible with the Blender versions available on our farm (2.66 to 2.74).
Update: Re-tested with versions up to 2.76, everything working well.
Each new GPU is equivalent with a GTX960 desktop card in terms of performance. Four of them will get you the same performance as having a couple GTX Titan cards in your computer. Now imagine having 100 of these servers rendering an animation at the same time! Even better, these cards have 4GB of memory, so your jobs have a greater chance of fitting in the GPU memory.
The next good news is that at the moment we are maintaining the same price for the server hour. The new servers are at the moment mixed with the old ones, so if some frames are rendering faster than the others don’t worry. Just render away and enjoy the free speed boost!
Want to share your opinion on the new servers, or how they compare to your rig (or farm)? Drop us a line in the comments.
