Moderately hopeful rendertoken or other forms of gpu marketplace gains traction this year.
Where are rendertoken currently at? Beta-testing still? Not currently giving out live rendering jobs yet are they?
...
EDIT: not considering ASICs at all. Not out of snobism, but because they really make no sense currently unless you're in need of a big door-stopper.
Their roadmap:
https://rendertoken.com/#roadmapWith any luck we will be rendering by end of the year.
I'm not a huge fan of ASICs too, but I will still grab some ASICs in promising algorithms to diversify, mainly those with good revenue to electricity cost ratio.
I'm keeping an eye on them too. I really hope that blockchain rendering takes off since I think it's an excellent use of "traditional" GPUs and may prove to be a safeguard against Asics (I think).
probably have to rebuild most miner rigs to render. with a lot of rigs having 1 pcie lane per card, 4 gigs ram, undernourished cpus and little storage (120 gig ssd or 32 gig flash drives.. well i cant see how its going to be able to get all the textures and such to the cards in enough time to be useful.
maybe rigs with 4 cards at pcie x4 or 3 cards at pcie x8 along with a good quad+ core cpu with much more ram, 16+ gigs maybe. and storage for jobs so 512 gigs or more. <-- all specs guesswork on my part
wonder how much bandwidth it needs?
Here's an extremely detailed 3hr long discussion on setting up an octane render rig. At 1hr 37 mins they talked about pcie lanes:
https://youtu.be/XrOBvz454fU?t=1h37m40sTLDR: A 8x pcie 3.0 connection per gpu is highly recommended
Long version: Pcie 1x lane works too, and the rendering speed is unrelated to lane bandwidth. However during data transfer the rig will be idle, which happens when you are receiving new job or swapping out the textures in gpu vram. The penalty will be especially heavy for out of core rendering (Scene is 64gb, gpu only has 11gb, there will be loads of transfer from system ram to vram).
When beta testnet launch, we will get a clearer picture on the ideal rig setup. Risers MIGHT still be the best price performance because a Threadripper mobo + 1900x will run $700+ USD and only fits 4 gpu. A gigabyte B250 fintech with 12 gpu and 64gb ram might be better bang for buck.
On a side note the Gigabyte b250 fintech is the only mining mobo with 4x ram slots, and 64gb imo is a must for rendertoken.
I hope someone comes up with a Onda B250 form factor threadripper board, with 7x pcie 8x slots and 2x m2 pcie slots. To run 7x 1180/2080 + 2x acorn fpga accelerator.
so I still have bills.