Nice article about the video-effects business, from the Quantel Paintbox to present-day CGI http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/05/how-london-became-the-home-of-hollywood-vfx-2/, from Ars Technica UK.

Betting on Moore’s Law:

Framestore tried to predict when technology would allow them to charge what their clients were willing to pay, and adjust the business accordingly. It was a risky, yet incredibly shrewd plan—and it paid off.

This same company went on to make “Walking With Dinosaurs”.

Moving away from the legendary SGI workstations of the early 1990s, towards more commodity hardware nowadays:

Today, VFX studios are powered by Intel processors, Nvidia graphics cards (all the VFX studios I spoke to used Nvidia graphics cards, citing reasons of driver stability), and Linux operating systems. These parts are just as accessible to consumers as they are to businesses: one only need look at the rise of YouTube and high-quality homemade videos to see just how far the commoditisation of VFX technology has come.

But those Nvidia cards are mainly used for on-screen previews, not the final renders:

Like the rest of the VFX industry, Pixar is yet to introduce GPUs into its render farms, preferring instead to use them in local or farm-based workstations for quick and dirty lighting previews. It faces the same issue as everyone else: GPUs simply don't have enough memory. Each frame in a final render requires as much 64GB of system memory, with films like Avatar pushing 128GB. The highest-end Nvidia graphics card comes equipped with just 12GB of memory.

The article has a strange reluctance to use the term “renderer”. It describes Arnold as “a cutting edge lighting program” and Renderman as “a way to flesh out an existing 3D model or animation with interactive lighting and shading”.

One quote I found revealing:

At most VFX studios the final render is done at around 2K resolution.

It doesn’t qualify this by saying this is for TV work, not for film work. So is 2K enough even for film work?

And just like when they moved from TV to film, studios like MPC, Framestore, and Pixar are waiting for technology to catch up with their creative ambitions, even if they're not all convinced 4K is the answer.

Meanwhile, some people are managing 4K renders https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+foundation+4k just fine...