What's New
Render Units are now 30% more powerful at the same price! A single Render Unit now delivers ~110 k/samples per minute, up from ~89 k/samples. This means you get higher quality renders faster and at a significantly lower effective cost per image.
Overview
Each Render Unit delivers the CPU power of approximately 110,000 samples per minute (~1.83 k/sample/s). This recent 30% performance increase means you achieve your target quality (number of passes or noise limit) faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.
The price per minute is 0.10$ and covers all costs.
💡 If one still image renders for one hour (60’), it will cost you 60 render units = 6$.
What is included in the render unit?
Helio Managed service
The managed service for our cloud rendering platform includes:
Software version updates.
The Helio platform for highly scalable cloud resources with one click.
Support.
SLA (Service level agreements).
3d-party licensing
Software licensing costs for the render engines and plugins.
Windows Server licensing costs for data center grade hardware.
Computing power
CPU/GPU power
Memory / RAM
Storage
Networking/data transfer costs
What This Means For You
The 30% increase in Render Unit power directly translates to two major advantages:
Faster Results: Your renders finish approximately 30% quicker, allowing you to iterate and complete projects faster.
Lower Effective Cost: Since each Render Unit does more work in the same amount of time, the cost to render an image at a specific quality level (e.g., a set number of passes or a specific noise limit) has dropped significantly. You are now getting more value for every credit spent.
How fast is a render unit?
Helio is committed to rendering your scenes with data center-grade, high-performance, and sustainable servers. (Compared to other services that usually use older desktop hardware to render your scenes, which are drastically slower).
This allows us to scale your projects to 10000s of servers at the same time and drastically reduce render time.
The speed of different services and your on-premise hardware is complex to compare. Therefore, we use industry-standard benchmarking tools like V-Ray Benchmark to compare the speed. Quick note: our servers are usually in the top 5 of the fastest CPUs ;-)
What is a k/sample?
The score for the CPU is called "k/sample" and can be used to compare how fast a CPU can render your scene linearly.
Do you upgrade the hardware?
As CPUs are getting faster and new, cheaper offerings constantly come to the market, and we update the k/sample value each quarter. This means the render power is expected to increase over time: Thanks to Helio's cloud rendering, you always get the best value for your money without investing in new, expensive hardware.