The Gem Dash

Eleven community-cloud GPUs. One fixed workload: our own MinkForge-XL-v1 rendering trading-card heroes, 60 minutes flat out, every image kept and quality-judged by a taste model we trained the same night. Total campaign cost: about seven dollars.

← back to the foundry

Heroes forged8,058one night · production quality

Speed crown2,185/hrOhioFlint · H100 NVL · wire to wire

Money crown3,797/$RTX 4070 Ti

LoRA crown$0.13full 1,400-step adapter · Taaffeite 3090 Ti

🏁 dash-1 renders / dollar

832×1152 card-art portraits · 20 steps · per-card max batch · 60-min timed sprint after warmup

gem	card	$/hr	batch	heroes	heroes/hr	heroes per $
💰 RTX 4070 Ti	RTX 4070 Ti 12GB	0.19	1	722	721	3,797
Sphalerite	RTX A4500 20GB	0.19	16	656	650	3,423
Grandidierite	RTX 4080 SUPER 16GB	0.28	2†	936	935	3,338
Hackmanite	RTX 4000 Ada 20GB	0.20	16	592	589	2,944
Taaffeite	RTX 3090 Ti 24GB	0.27	16	736	732	2,713
Poudretteite	RTX 5080 16GB	0.39	2†	992	990	2,539
Serendibite	L40S 48GB	0.79	16	1,232	1,223	1,547
⚡ OhioFlint	H100 NVL 94GB	2.59	16‡	2,192	2,185	844

† ran an early heavier-decode build — floors, not ceilings. ‡ batch probe caps at 16; on 94GB the wildcard was sandbagged. DNFs: Painite (3090) two dud hosts; Benitoite (4090) & Musgravite (5090) zero community stock all night — the card you can rent beats the card you can't.

🏋 dash-2 LoRA training / dollar

300-step rank-16 SDXL LoRA · 768² · same dataset slice · batch tiered by VRAM

gem	card	$/hr	batch	300 steps in	train-imgs/hr	per $
🏆 Taaffeite	RTX 3090 Ti 24GB	0.27	4	6.0 min	12,080	44,741
Grandidierite	RTX 4080 SUPER	0.28	2	3.8 min	9,519	33,996
RTX 4070 Ti	RTX 4070 Ti	0.19	1	4.7 min	3,826	20,137

Translation: one full category adapter ≈ 28 minutes ≈ $0.13. VRAM is the training lever — the exact inverse of the render race, where the cheap low-VRAM cards won. Two races, two different winners: that's why you measure.

🧠 The quality overlay own-judge taste model

Every hero scored by a taste head trained the same evening on our curation history (holdout AUC 0.944).

v1 heroes, mean taste4.2vs 3.5 lifetime archive average — the new model outscores every old era

Keeper rate8%vs 5.8% archive lifetime · keepers auto-promoted to the card mint

Quality by silicon≈ equalsame weights, same quality on every card — an early "H100 renders prettier" blip washed out at full sample

💵 What the measured rates buy

sprint	tier	measured-rate cost
100k heroes	production	~$27
1,000,000 heroes	production	~$265
10,000,000 drafts	4-step draft tier (est.)	~$700–900
one category LoRA	1,400 steps, 3090 Ti	~$0.13
the whole 100-LoRA board	tandem nights	~$15–20