Why not just buy your own GPU? Rentals are a ripoff in the first place unless you intend to use a datacenter-scale card.
The big cloud providers aren’t cheap but they do get things done quickly (unless they are out of some resource in your zone…)
It makes sense if you want to temporarily provision an A10 or bigger for your AI workload, or if you have enough users to saturate it. More often than not though, I think the amortized cost of GPU rental is much higher than the cost of ownership. If you want low power video decoding and good Vulkan drivers, get the Arc A770 with 16gb of VRAM. If you want AI power and DirectX support, the 3060 with 12gb of VRAM is also super accessible. Neither of those cost over $300, but running your A100 for a week will.
This winter I built a “gaming PC” with RGB bling and all with a 4080 (pricey but available close to MSRP at the time which the 4090 was not) which works well for the models I work with but I could certainly find models that need something bigger.
The other day my son asked me why I was playing Elden Ring on my Xbox One instead of my “AI PC”.
Definitely, I'm not ruling out a use-case for larger GPUs. I just think that the "enthusiast GPU rig" is more viable than ever, if you wanted to casually game/RDP/AI.
Also, count me among those people asking why you'd play Elden Ring on Xbox One, you deserve better than 30 fps. I played Elden Ring on my cough AI researching PC cough through Proton a lot last year, its really worth the extra power to enjoy it at a higher resolution. Same goes for that new legend of something-or-another game that may-or-may-not have a highly functional emulator or two floating around. You do you though :p
You guys may call me out for being silly and naive, but I'm renting cloud GPUs to test out a WebRTC project I'm building so I can play games w/ people on the same call.
It's really a way of optimizing the call software, albeit kind of expensive, but fun.
Also, not to burst your bubble, but there are a few projects out there that do more-or-less what you're describing:
- https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay/#together
- https://github.com/m1k1o/neko
If you're having fun, then continue by all means. I've just been nerd sniped by your cloud costs and I'm having flashbacks to seeing six-figure monthly AWS bills at startups that refused to buy their own GPU compute.