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).
I disagree with this takeaway. But full disclosure I’m biased: I work on OptiX. There is a reason Pixar and Arnold and Vray and most other major industry renderers are moving to the GPU, because the trends are clear and because it has recently become ‘worth it’. Many renderers are reporting factors of 2-10 for production scale scene rendering. (Here’s a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlmRuR5MKmU) There definitely are tradeoffs, and you’ve accurately pointed out several of them - memory constraints, paging, micropolygons, etc. Yes, it does take a lot of engineering to make the best use of the GPU, but the scale of scenes in production with GPUs today is already firmly well past being limited to turntables, and the writing is on the wall - the trend is clearly moving toward GPU farms.
So I'm well aware of the trade offs. As I mentioned, for lookdev and small scenes, GPUs do make sense currently (if you're willing the pay the penalty of getting code to work on both CPU and GPU, and GPU dev is not exactly trivial in terms of debugging / building compared to CPU dev).
But until GPUs exist with > 64 GB RAM, for rendering large scale scenes, it's just not worth it given the extra burdens (increased development costs, heterogeneous sets of machines in the farm, extra debugging, support), so for high-end scale, we're likely 3/4 years away yet.
The trend is pretty clear, though. The size of scenes than can be done on the GPU today is large and growing fast, both because of improving engineering and because of increasing GPU memory speed & size. It’s just a fact that a lot of commercial work is already done on the GPU, and that most serious commercial renderers already support GPU rendering.
It’s fair to point out that the largest production scenes are still difficult and will remain so for a while. There are decent examples out there of what’s being done in production with GPUs already:
https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray-gpu#showcase
Are GPUs starting to be used at earlier points in the pipeline? Yes, absolutely, but they always were to a degree in previs and modelling (via rasterisation). They are gradually becoming more useable at more steps in pipelines, but they're not there yet for high-end studios.
In some cases, if a studio's happy using an off-the-shelf renderer with the stock shaders (so no custom shaders at all - at least until OSL is doing batching and GPU stuff, or until MDL actually supports production renderer stuff) studios can use GPUs further down the pipeline, and currently that's smaller scale stuff from what I gather talking to friends who are using Arnold GPU. Certainly the hero-level stuff at Weta / ILM / Framestore isn't being done with with GPUs, as they require custom shaders, and they aren't going to be happy with just using the stock shaders (which are much better than stock shaders from 6/7 years ago, but still far from bleeding edge in terms of BSDFs and patterns).
Even from what I hear at Pixar with their lookdev Flow renderer things aren't completely rosy on the GPU front, although it is at least getting some use, and the expectation is XPU will take over there, but I don't think it's quite ready yet.
Until a studio feels GPU rendering can be used for a significant amount of the renders (that they do, for smaller studios, the fidelity will be less, so the threshold will be lower for them), I think it's going to be a chicken-and-egg problem of not wanting to invest in GPUs on the farms (or even local workstations).
The folks at Framestore and many other shops already don’t do more than XX GiB per frame for their rendering. So for me, this comes down to “can we finally implement a good enough texture cache in optix/the community” which I understand Mark Leone is working on :).
The shader thing seems easy enough. I’m not worried about an OSL compiled output running worse than the C-side. Divergence is a real issue, but so many studios are now using just a handful of BSDFs with lots of textures to drive, that as long as you don’t force the shading to be “per object group” but instead “per shader, varying inputs is fine”, you’ll still get high utilization.
The 80 GiB parts will make it so that some shops could go fully in-core. I expect we’ll see that sooner than you’d think, just because people will start doing interactive work, never want to give it up, and then say “make that but better” for the finals.