You sound like you've researched this, but it's not what I'm seeing.
Cards don't use full power when not using all CUDA cores so you need an actual measurement, not the number on the box.
I'm also 90% certain that Aorrta is Russian. I have no idea if he lives in Russia, so this may not be relevant, but in Russia the power is only ~6 cent per kwh.
The value per card, tested with Iray, is also available on the Daz3d webpage and 3090 scores 45 and the 3060ti scores 96(better than 3070).
The caveat is that you can't render nearly the same size scene because of the 8GB ram in the 3060ti(same as 3070).
Well i did not research the cards specificly.
The point was more in the realm of the smart choice is not always buying the most expensive fastest newest hardware.
You have to think about initial buy cost vs power consumption depending on country tho. There is also availablitity and other hardware needs to think about. As for example afaik the 3090 needs a bigger powersupply than every other card and therefor one hast to buy a new one then too. Im not saying that a hundred bucks here make a big diffrence but it would if the 3090 would cost like 400 bucks like a high end model gpu did cost in the good old days before nvidia was starting to fuck everybody over.
In some cases it may still make more sense to render with a cpu in the end as those are can come around the same performance money when you scale up you operations.
Also a cpu has not the same memory bottleneck as you were talking about and it is talked about here
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The other thing i do question a bit is the need for faster cards as in more render image output as that is mostly interesting for animation renderind at high framerate.
But that gives you mostly the same old fuck animations you can buy or pretty poorly 1 2 seconds loops with rolling eyes and tits like most do.
Making good unique animations takes a lot of time too and daz is especially bad for making animations anyway so you may have to use blender and find a way to import those into daz if you want to stick to render with iray. That also takes time.
Individual renders may take more time to setup in regards of posing characters and setting lighting and camera then there is postwork and you have to write a script and paste all of that into renpy in the end. That all takes probably longer even with an slower card also you can render while you sleep but in the end you have to setup something to render in the first place.
Im allso not sure that there is any evidence of producer making more money on patreon when they increase their output.
So buying a 3090 for 2500 bucks may not payout at all in the end. Lets say you use that card for 2 years before the next model comes out and its nearly worthless due to that fact that gives you around 100 bucks at least you have to earn more to pay for the card alone.
And so on and on.
I hope that makes my point a bit clearer why i think that it may not be a no brainer to get a 3090.
post scr:
aorta has currently
286
Patrons
so at lowest tier 2 dollars so lets say he makes around 500 dollars due to higher tiers and patreon takes a bit too.
Then their might be income tax although i dont know russian tax laws and if that guy has a fist job or not.
So why would someone making 500 bucks a month at best, spent 2500 dollars or more like 3000 dollars as he would have to buy some other components new then too which would cut his profit in half for a whole year???
I certainly would not do this.