Can you speak to any competitive advantages a vfx-centric gpu cloud provider may have over commodity AWS? Even the RenderMan XPU looks to be OSL / Intel AVX-512 SIMD based. Thanks!
Supercharging Pixar's RenderMan XPU™ with Intel® AVX-512
And GPU rendering has been gaining momentum over the past few years, but the biggest bottleneck until recently was availabe VRAM. Big budget VFX scenes can often take 40-120 GB of memory to keep everything accessible during the raytrace process, and unless a renderer supports out-of-core memory access, then the speed up you may have gained from the GPU gets thrown out the window from swapping data
Uncompressed, it’s 93Gb of render data, plus 130Gb of animation data if you want to render the entire shot instead of a single frame.
From what I’ve seen elsewhere, that’s not unusual at all for a modern high end animated scene.
Didn't you guys get the memo from B. Gates that no one will ever need more than 640k?