Message First, the way that the OSMF servers work is very different form typical. Most vector tile hosters generate a tileset fo…

First, the way that the OSMF servers work is very different form typical. Most vector tile hosters generate a tileset for their area of interest and reuse that for weeks or months. So they spend a bunch of CPU once to get a clear deliverable that they serve up quickly. This is very resource efficient *for the host* because they don’t need a bunch of CPUs or GPUs to scale up with user demand. And even if you render tiles more or less on demand with a cache invalidation policy like the OSMF does, vector might end up being less load on your servers (for reasons I’ll get to in a second). “Render” is a bit different in both cases of course too. Vector tiles “render” on the server side to the mathematical description, which is sent over to the client. Then the client transforms to pixels. For raster tiles, the server has to do the work, which means a MUCH larger server farm, but the work is re-used for all clients. MOST devices produced today which view maps have specialized GPUs which can render a vector tile very very fast. An iPhone made in 2016 is way more efficient than a more recent desktop with some cheap intel integrated graphics card. Android devices are somewhere in the middle. So I’d actually say this is *more* efficient if most of your user base is mobile and not on the cheapest tier of Android phones. Another factor is styling. If you want localized name display, or if your users are not all on very old displays or low end Android, then each variable (language, styling choices like which layers to show, line styling, dark variants, @2x or @3x HiDPI, etc.) multiplies the number of times you would need to render a raster tile. And this isa really clear case of where you could run something like live-ish tiles for editors OSMF-style, with fewer resources. OSM tiles look like absolute garbage with grainy text on my screen because it wouldn’t be economical to render multiple DPI variants. Soooooooo it’s nuanced and depends quite a bit on what your priorities are and what sort of hardware your user base has 🙂