What is an Octanebench point per hour?

While the paint is still wet on several public render farm service’s GPU rendering offerings, there seemed to be a consensus on how to charge. Since our competitors are using an Octanebench point per hour model, we decided it would be best to use the same model to allow for easy direct comparisons.

Octanebench is a GPU benchmarking utility created by Otoy as a tool to define the general compute power afforded by any combination of graphics cards in a computer. When this utility is run, it produces a combined “score” for the system being benchmarked, noted as Octanebench points. If a system has, say, 200 Octanebench points, and it runs for 1 hour, then that system delivered 200 Octanebench points per hour worth of compute power. In this way, any combination of systems and graphics cards can be said to deliver X units of GPU compute power by summing their respective Octanebench points and multiplying that by the number of hours those systems were running.

Carrying this to its final step, our system multiplies the total Octanebench points used (by a GPU-rendered job) by the rate that corresponds to your chosen Power level. This results in the total job cost.

Keep in mind, Octanebench points per hour is a measurement, similarly to CPU Gigahertz per hour. It is not a fictitious or otherwise made up number.