Superluminal vs iRender

Superluminal recorded the shorter render pipeline in all four scenes. Its 10-node run on the Fox scene led iRender by 14.1 seconds.

iRender ranked seventh with an Overall Score of 56.4. Its Time Score was 51.4, and its Price Score was 66.4. Three paid windows are exact. Classroom is an upper bound because the transfer client was hidden immediately before the first full completion proof.

A rented workstation, not a managed job

We rented one GPU Server 5S Windows workstation with four RTX 4090 GPUs. We booted the machine, opened Blender, started each render, and synchronized the output.

Renting is work. The machine took 733.7 seconds from start to the Connect button becoming ready, boot time iRender did not bill. From there you operate Windows over a remote session: open Blender, press render, watch it, and copy the output to iRender Drive yourself. During retrieval the client showed misleading transient states, at one point reporting 39 of 50 files at 0.0 Mbps, and needed a manual refresh before the counts moved.

Superluminal is the managed version of the same hardware wish. You submit from Blender, the farm runs the machines, and finished frames arrive on your disk while later frames render. Nothing boots on your clock, and nothing synchronizes by hand.

iRender charged 30 iR per machine-hour on its pay-as-you-go rate. The account required a $50 deposit.

iRender's own meter starts when the Connect button becomes ready, not when the machine activates. The Classroom window starts there. We removed the 29.9 seconds spent extracting the portable Blender archive from the scored time, and the cost keeps those seconds because billing continued. The later scenes reused the running workstation.

The paid window by scene

Scene	Active render	Render pipeline	Paid workstation window	Rate-derived cost	File synchronization
Classroom	418.5 s	434.8 s	≤1,225.7 s	≤10.46 iR (about $10.46)	≤503.9 s
Junk Shop	154.2 s	159.7 s	1,033.0 s	8.61 iR (about $8.61)	686.9 s
Monster Under the Bed	154.7 s	159.3 s	617.1 s	5.14 iR (about $5.14)	387.6 s
Fox (EEVEE)	74.5 s	80.6 s	736.7 s	6.14 iR (about $6.14)	556.5 s

The render-pipeline column covers provider setup, loading, rendering, and finalization. It excludes upload, download, and operator time. iRender is the machine-rental exception in the Time Score: its paid workstation window includes billed operator work and file synchronization. Classroom starts at Connect-ready and removes only the one-time Blender extraction.

The cost estimates apply the verified 30 iR hourly rate to each paid window, and each main-balance iR had a $1 face value. The windows overlap while files synchronize, so their costs do not add up to one four-scene total. No final invoice was captured.

The billing model is the deeper difference. iRender's meter runs on the machine, so your own clicking, waiting, and file copying all bill at the machine rate. Superluminal's meter runs on frames: each finished frame bills its measured render seconds, and nothing you do at the keyboard costs anything.

The recordings verify the local frame count. They do not prove that Blender used all four GPUs.

iRender Drive required a manual synchronization step, and in every tested scene that step took longer than the render itself. The Classroom and Fox (EEVEE) records show each synchronization step and completion proof.