What is the RNDR Network? — Parley Labs
To understand what the RNDR Network is you first need to understand who OTOY is and what they do:
OTOY is the Los Angeles based company behind OctaneRender®, “the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer.” Octane uses the graphics card in your computer to render photo-realistic images super fast.
OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers. If you’ve seen West World or The Avengers, you’ve seen renderings made using OctaneRender.
OTOY recognized a problem in scaling compute/render jobs, and their vision is to distribute the framework of the existing rendering service in OctaneRender® using RNDR, a digital token built on the Ethereum blockchain.
The RNDR Network
The Render Network is designed to connect users looking to perform render jobs with people who have idle GPUs to process the renders. By utilizing the Ethereum blockchain, the RNDR network can track and manage jobs without any third party intermediaries. This allows for the network to scale and grow without limits.
Owners would connect their GPUs to the Render Network in order to receive and complete rendering jobs using OctaneRender. Users would send RNDR to the individual performing the render work and OTOY would receive a small percentage of RNDR for facilitating the transaction and running the Render Network.
How are different systems compared?
OTOY uses their standard OctaneBench® (OB), which allows you to benchmark your GPU using OctaneRender. This provides a level playing field by making sure that everybody uses the same version and the same scenes and settings. Without these constraints, benchmark results can vary a lot and can’t be compared. This OB score is used by various Render Farms to compare different systems.
The Render Network™ will be the first network to transform the power of GPU compute into a decentralized economy of connected 3D assets. In the Render Network, each RNDR will obtain 256 seconds of rendering at 256 OctaneBench™.
To benchmark your system you can head over and run OctaneBench yourself. Note: OctaneRender currently only supports NVIDIA GPU’s, but will soon support AMD and more.
How does the RNDR Network differ from Crypto Currency Mining?
There are two major differences:
- RNDR Network is a distributed system of render nodes that utilizes Ethereum as an escrow and settlement layer.
- A Render node has hardware requirements that most crypto miners are not set up for.*
*note: see Converting your Crypto Miner into a RNDR Node.
Why Build This Distributed Network?
Scaling GPU rendering power is too difficult with traditional render technology. There are limits on what can be done rendering locally, on a network, or even in the cloud. It’s impossible to leverage GPUs throughout the world efficiently without some sort of decentralized system that tracks and manages render jobs.
For comparison, a 0.60 cents/hour G2 instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers around 37 OB, and a centralized version of the RNDR service, which launched in 2013 on Amazon G2 instances in partnership with AWS, Autodesk, and later, Google and other major cloud providers, is capacity limited at under 1 million OB.
When Will RNDR Network Launch?
The network is slated to launch their public BETA on the Ethereum mainnet at the end of Q2 on June 24 in parallel with OTOY’s release of OctaneRender 2018.
With the accelerated pace of OctaneRender development — three major releases in 6 months — we have been timing the RNDR launch to coincide with the most current Octane release so that users experience an easy interchange between the Octane and RNDR ecosystems.
Originally published at https://parleylabs.com on April 11, 2019.
