Q4 2022 — Q1 2023 Metrics Update: Monday, May 1st, 2023 (BTN)
Data update on the last two fiscal quarters of the Render Network
Usage between Q1 2023 and Q4 2022 held at a steady pace, while the network expanded its use cases and improved key features for scaling the network, including progress on native Cinema4D and multi-render support, more robust ORBX exporting tools, a key interim milestone facilitating running Stable Diffusion prompts directly from the Render Network creator portal, and development on a new AI assisted rendering suite previewed at GTC 2023. Steady usage combined with accelerating progress on expanding the network’s product reach — both for existing users and new applications — position the Render Network well for growth for the rest of the year.
If you are new to the project or catching up here is a nice statement of what the network is:
The Render Network provides near real-time rendering using a decentralized GPU processing model to meet users’ increasing GPU compute needs — both for current 3D rendering tasks and for emerging 3D applications. The Network allows for a model that improves render speed for artists, while reducing costs and increasing scale. It improves capital efficiency by utilizing idle GPU compute capability, and rewarding GPU providers for their service. It also creates the opportunity for open-access to a growing suite of render and render-related software providers.
Once a quarter we look at our statistics and publish them to our community to look for trends and opportunities. Feel free to join our Discord or Telegram and let us know if you see something we didn’t mention! Without further ado, let’s dive into the numbers:
Usage Numbers
Overall the Render Network saw steady network usage in Q1 2023, with a total of 2,119,813 frames rendered, representing a 2% growth over Q4 2022.
After a relatively slower start than in Q4 2022, we saw an increase in activity in March 2023, with 840,804 frames rendered resulting in a distribution of 235,955 RNDR, which represented increases of 15% and 29% respectively over the 729,448 frames rendered and 182,717 RNDR distributed in December 2022. This surge pushed the overall usage numbers for Q1 2023 over Q4 2022.
Tier Usage
Tier 3 network usage has increased, hitting equilibriums approaching 20% node utilization in some cases, which is a target for efficient supply / demand balancing. At these levels, utilization is high enough to meet node marginal cost needs, while the network maintains enough supply overhead to meet idiosyncratic usage spikes and avoid congestion (which is harmful for all network actors) and is especially important for creators.
In Tier 2, while we saw an overall drop in jobs, we did see a growth in smaller frame jobs created by B2B services via our API, leveraging the Render Network’s decentralized rendering to build 3D services on top of the network. While current B2B usage is focused on smaller frame sequences for certain applications, these can be expanded to larger frame sequences in the future, as the network and the 3D economy expands.
What can be read from this bifurcation of usage, in which the volume of jobs in absolute numbers has moved to Tier 2 while the majority of OctaneBench work has moved to Tier 3, is economically efficient sorting of network usage to meet different users needs. B2B users have leveraged the consistency and reliability of Tier 2 premium rendering services to build commercial applications at scale on top of the network’s decentralized rendering, while consumers and price sensitive artists have increased their use of Tier 3 to offload intensive rendering needs to the network. This differentiated usage enables the network to expand its services through more specialized product offerings to meet a greater variety of user needs.
The patterns between Tier 2 and Tier 3 demonstrated in Q1 show product traction for both sets of users, enabling differentiated product tiers to be further developed as RNP-002’s Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME) is implemented. Specifically, as Tier 3 begins to reach saturation levels above 20%+ node utilization rates, it enables the network to expand its premium Tier 2 services for B2B users as well as for artists wanting highly predictable, accelerated, or specialized rendering services. As more of these intensive or time-sensitive workflows move to Tier 2, it decreases network congestion on Tier 3, enabling more price sensitive artists to frictionlessly offload rendering jobs that would have otherwise been done locally to the Render Network — leveraging cheap, fast decentralized rendering more intensively in their creative workflows. A virtuous cycle emerges where efficient sorting of user preferences enables the network to scale its services sustainably for both B2B users and price sensitive consumers simultaneously, while increasing utilization rates for nodes who need to operate above marginal cost in order to function sustainably.
Network Improvements in Q1 2023
While usage held steady in Q1 2023, there was significant development work to increase the functionality of the network for current users as well as expand the Render Network ecosystem in 2023 — positioning the network to increase frequency of use from existing artists and reach new communities of developers and creators.
Rapid Improvements in C4D ORBX Export Speeds
A major barrier for artists accessing the Render Network has been exporting scenes as ORBX files. Exporting times for some scenes can be significant, and exporting complex geometry and effects has been a bottleneck for many artists. Due to exporting times, artists often forgo using the Render Network. This bottleneck is progressively being removed through a successive wave of ORBX Exporting development fixes that were delivered towards the end of Q1 2023 — increasing export speeds, stability, and refining exporting features so they are more native to UI’s in artist workflows. As was covered in an earlier Behind the Network post, feedback from C4D users in the Render Network community over the last few years was essential in prioritizing ease of use fixes to the exporter. With that in mind, a simple pathway has been created to allow for easy ORBX exporting directly from the live viewer panel, which can be found here on the Knowledge Base.
Beta of Stable Diffusion
On the Network side, frequent users may have noticed the addition this quarter of Stable Diffusion services as an option on the Render Network creator portal. The advent of AI creation has been one of the fastest growing markets in the history of the consumer internet. As previewed throughout talks over the last few years, and featured in the initial launch of the Network, the Render Network’s infrastructure aims to play a key role in harnessing AI to power the future of the emerging post-industrial creative economy. This expansion to include Stable Diffusion’s easy prompt creation suite natively into the Render Network creator portal is the first of many future-facing steps into the AI space in the years to come.
GTC Render Network Roadmap Highlights
As highlighted throughout our GTC 2023 recap post, there are a number of technologies in development and emerging onto the Network that are positioning the Render Network to not only maintain its Q1 2023 trajectory, but to expand into a period of growth for the foreseeable quarters. Between NeRFs, light-field technology expansion, an NFT toolset — which includes deep levels of on-chain metadata from the Render Graph that enable real-time streaming applications, complex Digital Rights Management (DRM) and deep layers of provenance for next generation virtual assets — the Network continues to expand out its suite of offerings. Alongside the previously mentioned Stable Diffusion expansion and Multi-render options currently in place, the continued diversification of Network services to holographic applications and 3D assets position the network well to be at the center of the emerging virtual economy.
Passage of RNP-002 and RNP-003 accelerates implementation of BME Model
As the network expands to a wider variety of use cases, including Stable Diffusion jobs on Render and multi-render support, modernized token-economic infrastructure, payment infrastructure, and blockchain infrastructure is important to support network scaling. The passage of RNP-002 and RNP-003 this past week via community vote have ratified the use of the Solana Blockchain for the implementation of the Burn and Mint Equilibrium, enabling low cost, high throughput transaction infrastructure to automate complex real-time multi-party payment flows. Meanwhile, RNP-003 has enabled the Render Foundation to acquire resources to accelerate implementation of network priorities ratified in the community governance process, starting with the implementation of RNP-002’s Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME). The passage of both RNPs help accelerate the implementation of new features that help the network operate more efficiently, enabling it to sustainably scale a multi-sided network.
The Render Network maintained consistent usage levels while releasing a number of important new features that position the network well for continued growth in H2 2023. In the first quarter, the network saw distinct and coordinated usage patterns begin to emerge, indicating the potential to increase user acquisition on multiple user categories simultaneously (B2B and Consumer) with specifically designed product features and incentive structures to more effectively accommodate these uses in upcoming implementation work now passed in network governance. The network also previewed a number of exciting emerging technologies in holographic media, streaming Artificial Intelligence (AI) and virtual assets, which present emerging opportunities for Render to expand its service offerings for its users. Finally, the Network’s community ratified two important governance initiatives, which enable the network to accelerate implementation of product improvements in 2023 providing services for an increasing number of users in absolute terms as well as in usage categories.
Join us in the Rendering Revolution at:
Website: https://render.x.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rendernetwork
Knowledge Base: https://know.rendernetwork.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/rendernetwork
Render Network Foundation: https://renderfoundation.com/
