Given current consumer GPUs are at 24 GB I think 3-4 years is likely overly pessimistic.
It's not just about them existing, they need to be cost effective.
They are really expensive though. But chassis and rackspace also isn't free. If one beefy node with a couple GPUs can replace have a rack of CPU only Nodes the GPUs are totally worth it.
I'm not too familiar with 3D rendering but in other workloads the GPU speedup is so huge that if its possible to offload to the GPU it made sense to do it from a economical perspective.
If 8k gaming becomes a real thing you can expect work to be done towards a solution, but until then not so much.
Edit: added [desktop] preceding PCIE