Often not. Below are the actual numbers from our own machines — what frames cost, how long they take, and how badly our own estimates missed — plus a calculator that will sometimes tell you to go and buy a GPU instead.
Five delivered jobs, 1,032 frames, all 4K Cycles at 96 samples, on RTX 5090 machines rented by the second from a GPU marketplace. These are our own production numbers, not a benchmark we set up to look good.
| Frames | Machines | Wall time | Per frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| 408 | 32 | 22 min | 56.3 s |
| 192 | 25 | 27 min | 47.0 s |
| 168 | 9 | 16 min | — |
| 144 | 11 | 17 min | 48.1 s |
| 120 | 14 | 28 min | 55.0 s |
A 4K frame at 96 samples took 47–56 seconds on a single RTX 5090. Across the three jobs where we recorded the bill, 720 frames cost us $6.73 in GPU rent — about 0.9 cents a frame. Marketplace rates we actually paid for a 5090 ranged from $0.47 to $0.56 an hour.
Before quoting a price we render a few real frames from the scene and extrapolate. Here is how that extrapolation held up against the finished job:
| Job | We estimated | It actually was | Off by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 408 frames | 82 s | 56.3 s | −31% |
| 192 frames | 61 s | 47.0 s | −23% |
| 144 frames | 35 s | 48.1 s | +37% |
| 120 frames | 65 s | 55.0 s | −15% |
Average miss, ignoring direction: 27%. Three of the four were overestimates, one was a 37% underestimate. A frame range is not uniform — a character walks into shot, a volume thickens, the camera turns toward the glass — and no sample of three or four frames can see that coming.
Which is the honest argument for a fixed quote. We absorb that 27%, because we are the ones who can measure it and you are not. Any farm billing you per GPU-minute is handing you the variance instead.
From our logs: a rented machine answers in 46–123 seconds, then spends another 14–117 seconds compiling render kernels before it produces a single pixel. You pay for all of it.
The tail is the problem: the last chunk finishes while everything else idles. Renting twice as many machines buys noticeably less than twice the speed.
A 4K PNG runs about 26 MB. A 408-frame job is 10.5 GB that has to come off the machines and reach you — and that time is part of your wait, not the renderer's.
It also drives your viewport every working day. A calculator that compares it purely on render hours is flattering the farm.
Put your own numbers in. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs in your browser.
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What this deliberately leaves out: your time setting the job up, the electricity bill's effect on your room in August, the resale market three years from now, and the fact that a card you own is also the card you model on. The arithmetic is honest; it is not the whole decision.
Send the scene, we render three real frames from your own range on a rented GPU and come back with a fixed number. The frames are yours whether or not you go ahead, and nothing is charged until you accept the price. If you'd rather just check the file is intact first, that's free too.
See how it works →Every figure above comes from our own job records: wall-clock time from the moment a render starts to the moment the last frame lands, per-frame times parsed from the render logs of each machine, and the marketplace invoices we actually paid.
The sample is small and we are not going to pretend otherwise: five delivered jobs, from a short span of time, with scenes that resemble each other. Treat 47–56 seconds as "what one kind of 4K scene did on one kind of card", not as a law. We will update this page as more jobs go through, including the ones that go badly.