GPU Render Farm for Blender

RenderStreet's GPU servers are equipped with NVIDIA L40s GPUs, each with 48 GB of VRAM. The L40s is a data center GPU built on NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace architecture, designed for rendering and compute workloads rather than gaming.

48 GB of VRAM is sufficient for high-poly scenes with millions of vertices, large 8K texture sets, volumetric simulations, and deep compositing passes. Scenes that would run out of memory on a consumer GPU with 8 or 12 GB of VRAM can render without modification on RenderStreet's L40s servers.

Blender Cycles is the primary GPU render engine on RenderStreet. Cycles is a physically-based path tracer that supports both CPU and GPU rendering. Since Blender 3.0, Cycles uses the Cycles X architecture, which brought significant GPU performance improvements including faster scene loading, better memory handling, and a redesigned kernel for GPU computation. Cycles handles ray tracing, global illumination, caustics, and all standard production rendering features.

EEVEE / EEVEE Next is Blender's rasterization-based render engine, designed for speed rather than full path-traced realism. EEVEE Next adds screen-space ray tracing, light linking, and an updated light probe system for indirect lighting. The engine handles volumetrics, depth of field, motion blur, subsurface scattering, and the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it well suited to animation, motion graphics, architectural walkthroughs, and stylized rendering. EEVEE runs exclusively on GPU, and RenderStreet was the first commercial render farm to support it.

RenderStreet offers straightforward per-hour pricing for GPU rendering:

• On-demand GPU rendering: $4.49 per server-hour, billed by the minute. There is no minimum spend and no commitment required.
• On-demand CPU rendering: $3.00 per server-hour, billed by the minute (for comparison).

For a full comparison of all plans, see Plans and Pricing.

The workflow for GPU rendering on RenderStreet follows these steps:

1. Upload your project using the RenderStreet Blender addon (one-click upload from inside Blender) or the web interface. The addon packages your .blend file along with all linked assets, textures, and dependencies.
2. Choose GPU rendering when submitting your project using the on-demand plan. RenderStreet automatically routes the job to a GPU-equipped server; you don't need to pick a specific machine.
3. RenderWheels, RenderStreet's resource allocation system, dynamically allocates render nodes and distributes frames across available GPU servers based on scene complexity and computing effort needed.
4. Frame previews appear in the browser as frames complete rendering. You can monitor progress and spot issues early without waiting for the full animation to finish.
5. Download completed frames directly from the web interface, or configure auto-delivery via FTP or Dropbox to receive frames as they finish.

Both GPU and CPU rendering are available on RenderStreet, and each has strengths depending on the scene.

GPU rendering excels at: Cycles scenes with heavy ray tracing and global illumination, animation sequences where reduced per-frame time compounds across hundreds or thousands of frames, and any project using EEVEE (which is GPU-only). GPU rendering is typically significantly faster than CPU for standard Cycles scenes, though the actual speedup varies by scene complexity, shader types, and resolution.

CPU rendering handles: scenes with complex OSL (Open Shading Language) shaders that cannot run on GPU, extremely memory-intensive scenes that exceed 48 GB of VRAM (CPU servers have up to 256 GB of RAM), and scenes relying on features that are not yet GPU-accelerated in Cycles.

General guidance: for most Cycles scenes, GPU rendering finishes faster than CPU rendering. The higher hourly rate ($4.49 vs $3.00) is often offset by the shorter render time, so total project cost can be comparable to or lower than CPU rendering.