Pixar's Render Farm

I'm surprised they hit only 80-90% CPU utilization. Sure, I don't know their bottlenecks, but I understood this to be way more parallelizable than that.

I ray trace quake demos for fun at a much much lower scale[0], and have professionally organized much bigger installs (I feel confident in saying even though I don't know Pixar's exact scale).

But I don't know state of the art rendering. I'm sure Pixar knows their workload much better than I do. I would be interested in hearing why, though.

[0] Youtube butchers the quality in compression, but https://youtu.be/0xR1ZoGhfhc . Live system at https://qpov.retrofitta.se/, code at https://github.com/ThomasHabets/qpov.

Edit: I see people are following the links. What a day to overflow Go's 64bit counter for time durations on the stats page. https://qpov.retrofitta.se/stats

I'll fix it later.

I suspect they mean core count utilization, not per core utilization.

Ie there's some headroom left for rush jobs and a safety net, because full occupancy isn't great either.