~1.9 minutes of gaming per card
Every image in Mortal Arcana is AI-generated, made locally on a single mid-range NVIDIA RTX 4060 — no cloud render farm, no hyperscale data center, just the power it takes to run one desktop. A 4060 pulls about the same ~115W rendering a card (~1.9 min) as it does running a game, so in energy terms each card is roughly 1.9minutes of someone’s favorite shooter. That’s the honest unit.
On-prem, not a data center.
One mid-range consumer GPU in a room, drawing the power of a desktop. There is no rack, no campus, no cooling tower — just a tower under a desk.
We count everything.
The tally includes drafts, rerolls, and finals — every render that ever drew power. Nothing hidden behind “final cards only.” The number up top is the whole receipt.
What the whole receipt costs.
Run that entire tally through the meter and it comes to about 19.9 kWh — roughly $2.49 of electricity at Louisiana’s average residential rate of about 12.5¢/kWh, among the lowest in the US. Less than a cup of coffee, for every card we’ve ever rendered.