Render Power and Render Work

In order to quantify the time and prices in the render hive, there need to be common figure of merits for the render hardware and render jobs. The Renderhive project will utilize the Blender Benchmark tool to compare the different systems and the required computation time for different render jobs. Based on this tool, two quantities are defined: Render power and render work.

Render Power

The render power is a figure of merit that quantifies the computation power of a machine with respect to the rendering process in Blender. It is measured in Blender Benchmark Points (BBP) and is simply the score value achieved in the Blender Benchmark tool by this specific node.

Render Work

The render work – as the name suggests – quantifies how much computational work is required by a specific Blender project to be rendered and its unit is defined as the Blender Benchmark Hour (BBh). Naturally, the ratio of the render work and the render power is equal to the time a specific computer requires to render a project.

Example.

Let’s assume we have two computers. The first one has a Blender Benchmark score of 5953 (e.g., a Nvidia RTX 3090) and, thus, we define it has a render power of 5953 BBP. The second computer has a render power of 1372 BBP (e.g., Apple M1 Ultra with 64 core GPU).

We now render a project on the first computer and it turns out that it requires 30 min (0.5 h) to complete the rendering process. This project can, therefore, be said to require a render work of:

5953 BBP * 0.5h = 2977 BBh.

Knowing the render work required to render the project, we can estimate how long the rendering process would take on the second computer. That is:

2977 BBh / 1372 BBP = 2.17 h (i.e., about 2h 20min).

As can be seen in the example above, this two quantities allow for a comparison of both the different machines and also of different render jobs. Consequently, they are a feasible way to estimate render times on the different nodes of the render hive.

It should be kept in mind that rendering is a complex process and the performance of this process always depends on the computer hardware, the scene, other background processes that run on the computer, and many more. All calculations of render times on Renderhive will, thus, only be estimates. The real rendering performance and, consequently, the rendering costs for a specific job may differ from these estimates.