From Super Bowl LIX to RenderCon 2026: CGI at Scale and the Next Era of Global Compute
2026 is moving fast.
As Super Bowl LIX lands this weekend, it’s another reminder of how spectacular graphics and CGI now sit at the center of live sports, music, and culture.
From broadcast packages to halftime shows, visuals aren’t just decoration anymore, they are the experience.
At Render Network, we’re excited about what this means for the next decade: creators tapping global GPU compute to ship cinematic visuals at massive scale.
Super Bowl LIX: Where Live Sports Meets Cinematic Graphics
Every year, the Super Bowl pushes the bar higher with real-time graphics, immersive stage design, and production pipelines that increasingly resemble film.
This convergence of live events and CGI is exactly where visuals are headed.
Super Bowl LVIII visuals powered by Render Network
Render Network user and multi-Emmy award-winning artist Andy Torres has delivered visuals across major moments in live entertainment.
He’s been the creative force behind the Kansas City Chiefs’ visuals since 2018 — including the ultra-high-resolution “Countdown to Kickoff” trailer that wrapped around the Caesars Superdome.
Fans in New Orleans, and hundreds of millions watching worldwide, saw the piece come alive, with visuals rendered entirely on Render Network using thousands of decentralized GPUs.
Andy’s work also spans:
- 2024 Grammy Awards
- Projects tied to Stranger Things on Render Network
- Super Bowl LVIII
- Maybe visuals connected to Super Bowl LX this weekend
It’s a real-world example of how cinematic graphics for the biggest sporting events are now being powered by decentralized compute.
Check out Andy’s work at andytorresfilms.com or follow him on Instagram @andytorres_a, and keep an eye out for his visuals during this year’s Super Bowl.
Crafting Immersive Worlds from Puerto Rico
STURDY, the team behind an impressive list of productions for this year’s half-time performer Bad Bunny, led content design and production for his No Me Quiero Ir De Aquí Puerto Rico residency and ongoing DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS World Tour, translating island culture and energy into large-scale immersive visuals.
Those projects were built using Octane, while Render Network has been used by the studio on other live events and productions. Together, these pipelines show how modern workflows are pushing cinematic rendering to new scale — high fidelity, fast iteration, massive displays, and global audiences now being the standard.
RenderCon 2026: Early Bird Tickets Releases Next Week
Looking ahead: Pre-sale (community pass) RenderCon tickets go live early next week, with several main-stage speakers already confirmed and panelists locked in.
RenderCon 2026 takes place April 16–17 at Nya Studios in Hollywood.
If you’re planning to join, now’s the time to prepare to travel to Los Angeles for two full days of talks, hands-on workshops, and conversations with leaders across media, technology, and digital art.
Where This Is All Going…
High-end visuals are no longer confined to studios, they’re powering moments watched by hundreds of millions. Live sports, music, film-grade pipelines, and real-time CGI are now standard across cultural events. Even this year’s Super Bowl ads reflect the shift, like Xfinity’s Jurassic Park-themed spot bringing back legacy characters with modern VFX for a new generation.
That’s the future we’re building toward: artists and production teams creating at massive scale without centralized limits, backed by global GPU infrastructure.
Enjoy Super Bowl weekend, and take a moment to appreciate the invisible layer underneath it all: the creators, the tools, and the compute making these experiences possible.
The Future of Olympic Viewing
With the Olympics happening in Italy for Milano Cortina 2026, it’s hard not to think about where sports viewing is going next.
This is the shift: from watching a game to being inside it.
Arcturus is building 4D Gaussian splatting tech that captures sporting events from every angle, pushing volumetric video far beyond 360 or 3D-180. Experiencing it in a headset puts you closer to the action than any stadium seat, and makes traditional formats feel instantly outdated.
If this is where we’re headed, the next Olympics won’t just be watched, they’ll be entered.
Latest AI Headlines:
- RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model) explores real-time, interactive frame generation from images, synthesizing new views on the fly without explicit 3D.
While Marble focuses on high-fidelity, persistent worlds via 3D Gaussian splats, the interesting frontier is how ideas from both approaches may eventually converge.
- Introducing Project Genie: the most advanced experimental world model, generating playable worlds in real time from text prompts.
- LingBot-world launches as an open-source frontier world model, pushing high-fidelity simulation, long-horizon consistency, and physical + game-world modeling.
- Technical showcase: peer-to-peer GPU sharing, entirely in the browser. AI Grid runs LLMs locally with WebGPU, letting users donate spare compute or borrow from others, no installs, no cloud, just decentralized inference from a URL.
- Waymo leverages Google’s Genie3 world model for hyperrealistic autonomous driving simulation to model for some of the most rare and complex scenarios — from tornadoes to planes landing on freeways.. creating data sets for scenarios with no sample data set.
