Use case · 3D rendering
GPU cloud rendering: a render farm that bills like a stopwatch
Classic farms charge per GHz-hour with queue fees and priority tiers. Here it is one number: RTX 4090 at $0.262/hr — about $0.008 per 3.5-minute Cycles frame on interruptible — with OptiX, your exact Blender version, and zero markup on idle.
The render cards, ranked
| Tier | GPU | VRAM | On-demand | Interruptible | Why this card | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good | RTX 4090 | 24 GB | $0.262 | $0.131 | OptiX monster for scenes under 24 GB — the best price per sample in the catalogue. | Deploy |
| Better | RTX 6000Ada | 48 GB | $0.513 | $0.256 | 48 GB ECC for production scenes, studio drivers, server-grade thermals. | Deploy |
| Best | RTX PRO 6000 WS | 96 GB | $1.097 | $0.548 | 96 GB GDDR7 — city-scale scenes, volumes and 8K texture sets fully in memory. | Deploy |
A 720-frame shot, quoted
| Frames | 720 × ~3.5 min on RTX 4090, interruptible queue | $5.50 |
|---|---|---|
| Parallelised | Same queue across 8 single-GPU instances | ~5.3 h wall-clock, same cost |
| Scene volume 80 GB | assets + EXR output, one month | $6.40 |
| Download EXRs 40 GB | 40 × $0.01 | $0.40 |
Per-second billing means parallelising is free: 8 instances for 1 hour cost what 1 instance costs for 8.
Farm patterns
- Frames as queue items — blender -b scene.blend -f N per item; interruptions re-render one frame, not the shot.
- Assets on a read-only volume — 8 workers mount one scene library.
- Interactive lookdev on a VM — VNC desktop on a workstation card, then switch to headless for the farm.
- Pin your Blender version — templates are tagged; renders are reproducible.
GPU cloud rendering: FAQ
Full setup in the Blender cloud guide.
Which renderers work on rented GPUs?
Anything CUDA/OptiX: Blender Cycles, Octane, Redshift, V-Ray GPU, Arnold GPU. The Blender template renders .blend files headless out of the box; Octane/Redshift run inside a full VM with your own licences and a VNC desktop if you want one.
What does a frame cost?
A Cycles frame that takes 3.5 minutes on an RTX 4090 costs about $0.008 interruptible. A 720-frame shot: ~$6 — and per-frame queue items make interruptions free re-runs.
Why a workstation card instead of a 4090?
VRAM and ECC: heavy production scenes (fur, volumes, 8K textures) blow past 24 GB. The RTX PRO 6000 WS (96 GB) and RTX 6000Ada (48 GB) hold entire scenes in memory with studio drivers — still far below hyperscaler workstation pricing.