[wongarsu]

The correct calculation is not 900€/36 months but (900€-$resell_value)/36 months. If you sell your GPU for 450€ after three years you saved a good bit of money. If the AI bubble doesn't pop, your resale value might even be a good bit higher than that. I've had a used 1080TI that I used for five years and then sold for nearly the same price, making it effectively free (minus electricity use and opportunity cost)

[fluoridation]

Even if you don't resell it, at the end of the three years you still have a GPU that you can keep using, or gift, or whatever. After three years of renting, you have nothing.

[Jlagreen]

And what about the extra energy consumption of the RTX 5070 TI vs. a iGPU? If you go GPU cloud then you can save on energy as well in your PC. Less energy means also less noise by the way.

To get an idea, if you go gaming via cloud then fast internet + office PC or Laptop is enough. So you save way more than the GPU only in a proper comparison.

This is why I play consoles only. I can play games for years without ever changing HW and save tons of money compared to my PC gaming times.