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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

The author probably does not realize that Moore's Law has really slowed down and the geometric increase in 3D rendering power is unlikely to continue as fast as in the past. Not to mention that you need ever more graphics processing power to make smaller and smaller improvements in realism. I therefore suspect it will take longer than anticipated to get to the cinematic quality that he hopes for at the price needed for the transformation he anticipates.

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So for CPUs yes, for GPUs we have seen massive progress even just this year. The Nvidia RTX cards have actual real-time raytracing, not some demo, an actual working product, that can handle massive scenes. I saw a Pixar Renderman talk where they used an Nvidia RTX Quadro to real-time raytrace the entire city in Coco.

Less about raw power, more about specialization. There is a lot of room still in specialization. In graphics, with things like ray-tracing, and in AI with things like the TPUs.

Moore's law is about transistor density, not clock rate, floating point operations or anything else.

CPUs have risen in transistor count too, they just use the transistors to speed up serial general purpose computations as much as possible.

Moore's law is not about benchmarks.

Seems like we really are going to be stuck at around 5GHz for CPUs (we will see how many cores) and <20TFlops in GPUs, whereas for realtime animations we would need a ~1,000x speedup :-(

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