GTC 2024 recently wrapped up, Nvidia’s own conference focusing on AI. AI has been all the rage since the spark of ChatGPT made the world aware of what is to come. Crypto market participants are always looking for some kind of an edge, a way to bet on a narrative with potential, and AI looks to be a favorite for many. NEAR, which had a background in AI before pivoting to crypto, is gaining some more traction. Some people are associating tokens like $WLD with AI, due to it being Co-Founded by Open AI CEO Sam Altman. And of course, Bittensor’s TAO token has fared remarkably well.
With NVDA’s recent outperformance on the equities side of things, people are taking a look at tokens with similar driving factors. io.net has caught the attention of many, though its token has not yet gone live yet, leaving Render’s $RNDR as the primary way to bet on the AI/GPU-shortage narrative.
$RNDR saw some action earlier in the month heading into Nvidia’s conference, nearly doubling in price. Given the most recent market correction, which put $RNDR ~20% below its recently-printed ATHs, it might be worth analyzing the protocol and determining if it could prove a good way to get some AI adjacent exposure for those looking to express this narrative.
Stay alert, stay informed ⬇
Key Points
Render is creating a peer-to-peer network that enables GPU rendering tasks to be completed using idle GPUs.
Through the Render Token ($RNDR), content creators can access a vast network of idle GPUs. This not only accelerates the rendering process but also democratizes access to high-quality rendering resources.
The demand for GPUs to train AI models is causing a major shortage of GPUs right now, with AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle all limiting GPU availability to customers.
Today, the Render Network has surpassed the GPU cloud rendering capacity of the largest cloud providers; Render is designed to support GPU compute power at scale.
This offers dramatic increases in scale and significantly reduces costs for content creators.
Render protects property rights, a critical aspect in the digital content creation industry.
Background on Render
Render sits at the intersection of AI, AR/VR tech, and blockchain. The Render Network is a decentralized network that uses blockchain technology to facilitate distributed GPU rendering, as opposed to centralized GPU rendering providers like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.
You can think of the Render Network’s business model as somewhat similar to Airbnb’s. With Airbnb, idle homes can be rented for very specific windows of time. Travelers or people with a dynamic demand for short-term housing can simply book a home to live in for the specific period of time they would actually live in it, as opposed to signing a rental contract or purchasing the home outright.
In this same vein, Render connects idle GPUs with content creators who have demand for the rendering power these GPUs provide. These content creators can simply pay for how much processing power they will actually use, rather than agreeing to longer-term contracts with centralized providers that would result in money being paid even when the GPUs aren’t in use.
The Render network connects individuals or entities (referred to as “Creators”) who need rendering work with those who have idle GPU resources (known as “Node Operators”).
Here’s how the process of accessing GPU resources on Render works:
1) Job Submission: Creators who need rendering work done submit their files to the Render Network along with payment in $RNDR tokens, the native currency of the Render Network.
2) Job Assignment: The Render Network assigns these jobs to Node Operators, who have registered their idle GPUs on the network. The assignment of jobs is based on the capability of the GPUs and the requirements of the rendering job.
3) Rendering and Verification: Node Operators complete the rendering work using OctaneRender, a GPU-based rendering software built by OTOY, the company behind the Render Network. Next, the Render Network verifies the accuracy and quality of the rendered work.
4) Payment: Upon successful completion and verification of the render job, the Node Operator receives the $RNDR tokens from the Creator. A small percentage of the $RNDR tokens is taken by the Render Network for maintaining the network and facilitating the transaction.
OctaneRender: An Open Economy for Rendering
To Understand how OctaneRedner works and what makes it special, it’s important to have a pretty thorough understanding of how GPU rendering in general works, and why it is needed.
Rendering is a crucial process in the field of computer graphics. Basically, rendering transforms raw data into the visual content that you see when watching a movie, or playing a game. The original graphics model contains geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information that describes the virtual scene that the audience will eventually see. This data, contained in a scene file, is then passed to a rendering program to be processed and output to a digital image or raster graphics image file.
Compared to other rendering software, the OctaneRender engine stands out for its accuracy in the physical space. It became the first commercial renderer to harness the power of graphics cards (GPUs) rather than relying on traditional CPU-based rendering. This allows OctaneRender to produce photo-realistic images at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than previous renderers.
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