Single GPU Runs 4 AI Avatars Simultaneously at ¥7,600/Month, CPU Is the Bottleneck

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A Japanese tech team building an unmanned 3D avatar live-streaming system tested how many avatars a single cloud GPU could handle simultaneously. Using an RTX 4000 Ada GPU, they confirmed four avatars could stream at 720p30 in real time, with each costing around ¥7,600 per month for 24/7 operation. Contrary to expectations, the GPU was only 26% utilized — the true bottleneck was the CPU, which became saturated handling frame extraction, encoding, audio mixing, and streaming. The team also reduced pod startup time from four minutes to 95 seconds and built an automatic host-switching mechanism after discovering some instances crashed every 60 seconds. They noted that adopting hardware encoding via NVENC could free up CPU resources and potentially push capacity beyond four avatars.

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