I don't think so... I have hundreds of images being generated on the fly every second. I put them in a QGraphicsScene with a bunch of other QGraphicsItems. The user has the ability to make some of the QGraphicsItems visible/invisible at run time, so at the time the images are generated, I don't know which will be needed and which won't be needed.

Once an image does get rendered, I cache the rendered image for any repaintings. But the normal use case is to generate new images at 60fps. I do have time to render just the "top layer" of images and keep that frame rate. But because I am also spending time rendering in paint() calls for the lower (obscured) images, I'm overrunning my frame time.