Porth Rendro Media Cymru
The Media Cymru Render Portal
A GPU render farm for the Cardiff Capital Region, whose waste heat warms a community project in the heart of Caerphilly — Y Bank, a building that used to be a bank.
Animation and visual effects studios across the region are invited to render with us at a special rate.
FUNDED BY MEDIA CYMRU · BUILT WITH BOMPER STUDIO
The project
Rendering that heats a building
Rendering is one of the most energy-hungry things a studio does, and in a conventional render farm every watt of it is spent twice: once on the frame, and again on the cooling needed to throw the heat away.
This farm does the opposite. The GPUs sit in Y Bank, a community project in a former bank in the centre of Caerphilly, and the heat they produce while rendering your frames is the heat that warms the building. The render is paid for once and the warmth comes free.
It was funded by Media Cymru through its Greening the Screen grant, which backs projects that cut the carbon footprint of the screen sector across the Cardiff Capital Region. Bomper Studio, in South Wales, gave us the animation and rendering knowledge to build something studios would actually want to use. Our thanks to both.
Already rendered
Frames that have already heated water
The heata network has rendered commercial animation and architectural work for studios across the UK. Media Cymru funds the Welsh farm; the way the work runs is the same.
The hardware
Every node is a GeForce RTX 4090 — 24GB of memory, so most production scenes fit on one card without splitting.
GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, Ada Lovelace architecture |
|---|---|
CUDA cores | 16,384 per card |
Memory | 24GB GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus, about 1,008GB/s |
Clock | 2.52GHz boost, 2.23GHz base |
Ray tracing | 3rd-generation RT cores, 4th-generation Tensor cores |
Encoding | Dual 8th-generation NVENC encoders with AV1 |
Board power | 450W per card — and every watt of it ends up as hot water |
Specifications are NVIDIA’s own for the GeForce RTX 4090. Tell us what you render and we will tell you how it behaves on this hardware.
Pricing
A discounted rate for studios in the Cardiff Capital Region, for the life of the project.
Region rate | £2 per GPU-hour |
|---|---|
Billed | Per GPU-hour of rendering, on the frames you actually render |
Quotes | Send us the project and we will come back with a figure before you commit |
Prices exclude VAT. Email render@heata.co with your scene, frame count and deadline, and we will quote the job.
STUDIOS WHO HAVE RENDERED WITH US
“The team at heata is very supportive and the process is straightforward. I’d encourage any studio concerned with sustainability to give heata a try.”
Nick Homer, Managing Director, F10 Studios
“heata helped us render a 40-second passion piece, which we premiered at D2 Conference. They delivered on time, and were able to deal with the complexities of our files!”
Aneta Gesiorska, Co-Founder, Eleven Visualisation
“Our client Landsec was hugely responsive to the positive impact. We look forward to working together on future projects.”
Edward Mascarenhas, CGI Director, Model Works
Frequently asked questions
Animation, VFX and visualisation studios in the Cardiff Capital Region. If you are just outside it, ask anyway — tell us where you are and what you are working on.
Email render@heata.co with the scene, the frame count, your renderer and your deadline. We will render representative test frames where it helps, so the figure you get is based on your actual work rather than a guess.
Anything that runs on an RTX 4090 with 24GB of memory — including GPU rendering in V-Ray, Corona, Arnold, Cycles and Redshift. Tell us your setup and we will confirm it before you commit to anything.
Into Y Bank, a community project in a former bank building in the centre of Caerphilly. The GPUs are the heating. Nothing is vented to the outside and nothing is spent on cooling.
Media Cymru, through its Greening the Screen grant, which supports projects that reduce the carbon footprint of the screen sector across the Cardiff Capital Region. Bomper Studio contributed the animation and rendering expertise.
Talk to us
Send us something to render
Tell us what you are working on and we will quote it. Frames in, hot water out.