How much will your render cost?
It depends which service you are on. Blender and Unreal Engine are rented by the node: you choose the graphics cards and pay for the time they run, from $0.089 per hour (1x RTX 3060) to $5.18 per hour (8x RTX 5090) — about 0.09 SkyPoints for an hour of the cheapest node. Those are rates, not units of sale: a node meters by the second, so a ten-minute render on the cheapest one costs $0.015, with no minimum and no rounding up to the hour. Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D are cloud render: the farm assigns the machines and you pay for the CPU and GPU hours your job uses.
The estimate below covers the rented-node side. Enter your own GPU, how long a frame takes locally, and how many frames you need, and it compares benchmark throughput to work out the farm's render time and cost. For a Maya, 3ds Max or Cinema 4D job, ask us for a quote rather than reading a number off this page — it is built on the other model and would be wrong.
Blender and Unreal Engine are rented by the node — you choose the cards and pay for the seconds they run at the node's hourly rate, which is what this estimate works out.
224 cards in 6 families, fastest first.
The cheapest node of each kind available right now. Nodes are rented from a live market, so the price in SkyRender Desktop moves with it and can be a little higher or lower by the time you submit.
You only pay for render time. Billing is per second, not per hour, and each node's meter stops the moment it runs out of frames. How many nodes you split your frames across doesn't change the cost of the rendering itself.
What you're buying is time. Renting more nodes barely changes the total cost. It simply gets your job finished much sooner.
Includes about 1 minute of start-up per node (the scene arriving and the application opening).
Estimates compare GPU benchmark throughput. Scene loading, displacement, simulation caches and I/O are not captured by a benchmark score, so treat this as a starting point and send two or three test frames before committing a full sequence.
Estimated cost
$4.29
about 4 SkyPoints
What nodes buy
| Nodes | Finishes in | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 49 min | $4.05 |
| 8 | 13 min | $4.29 |
| 15 | 8 min | $4.58 |
The same 250 frames are rendered either way, so the cost stays almost the same. More nodes simply finish sooner.
How the estimate works
Every GPU has a benchmark score representing throughput. A machine with twice your score renders the same frame in about half the time, so the farm's render time is your local time multiplied by the ratio of the two scores, and the cost is that time at the machine's hourly rate — charged by the second, so a part hour is a part charge.
For Blender and Unreal Engine, more nodes shorten the job without enlarging the bill. This is the rented-node service and only that one: Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D are cloud render, where the farm sizes the job and there is no node count for you to choose.
An animation is a fixed amount of work — 200 frames is 200 frames whichever machines render them — and since nodes meter by the second you are paying for that work, not for how widely it is spread. Two nodes and fifteen nodes come to roughly the same total; the two-node run takes most of a night and the fifteen-node run takes about an hour. A node that runs out of frames is released, so nodes left without work in the last round are not billed. The only thing width adds is start-up: each node can take about a minute to start and load your scene before its first frame. Move the node slider above and watch the cost barely move while the finish time falls.
What a benchmark cannot know is your scene: asset loading, displacement, particle and fluid caches, and disk I/O all add time that no GPU score captures. That is why job cost updates live while rendering, and why sending two or three test frames first is the reliable way to confirm both time and cost.
Credits are spent as jobs render. One SkyPoint costs $1, so a dollar estimate is also a SkyPoints estimate.
Questions about the estimate
How accurate is the estimate?
It is a starting point, not a quote. The calculator compares your GPU's benchmark score with the farm node's and scales your local frame time by the difference, which is reliable for the rendering itself. What a benchmark cannot see is your scene: asset loading, displacement, particle and fluid caches and disk I/O all add time. Render two or three test frames first; their real time and cost tell you what the full sequence will take far better than any estimate.
Is the estimate what I will be charged?
No. You are charged for the time the nodes actually run, metered by the second, so the bill follows the real job rather than the estimate. Job cost updates live in SkyRender Desktop while the job renders, so you can watch it and stop the job at any point.
Why does the estimate add a minute for every node?
Before a node renders its first frame it has to start up and load your scene. That can take about a minute on average, and every node spends it whether it renders one frame or twenty. It is the only part of the cost that grows with the number of nodes, so on a short job spread over many nodes it can be a noticeable share of the total. On a long animation it hardly matters.
Can I use the calculator for Maya, 3ds Max or Cinema 4D?
No. Those applications run as cloud render: the farm assigns the machines and bills the CPU and GPU hours the job uses, so there is no node count or node rate to put into the calculator. Contact us with your scene details for a quote, or send a few test frames and check the job cost in SkyRender Desktop.
More answers on the FAQ page.