High end VFX/CG usually tessellates geometry down to micropolygon, so you roughly have 1 quad (or two triangles) per pixel in terms of geometry density, so you can often have > 150,000,000 polys in a scene, along with per vertex primvars to control shading, and many textures (which can be paged fairly well with shade on hit).
Using ray tracing pretty much means having all that in memory at once (paging sucks in general of geo and accel structures, it's been tried in the past) so that intersection / traversal is fast.
Doing lookdev on individual assets (i.e. turntables) is one place where GPU rendering can be used as the memory requirements are much smaller, but only if the look you get is identical to the one you get using CPU rendering, which isn't always the case (some of the algorithms are hard to get working correctly on GPUs, i.e. volumetrics).
Renderman (the renderer Pixar use, and create in Seattle) isn't really GPU ready yet (they're attempting to release XPU this year I think).
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.