Rendering, Carmack and Machinima

This
Ask Slashdot item caught my eye because the question seemed so ludicrous:
When will the big movie graphics houses (such as Pixar
and Industrial Might and Logic) be switching
over from their massive renderfarms to GPUs (graphics cards, to you and me)
such as those produced by NVIDIA and
ATI? My initial reaction
was the same as
the first
post I saw: “Is this a slow news day or what???”
NVIDIA may be offering
Personal Cinema
but actual cinema-quality rendering is several leagues away, surely?

Not so, says John Carmack,
and he should know – his .plan file
has been the game-tech geek’s most essential read for years. (You
remember .plan files, right? They were like blogs, except you didn’t
have to spend hours making the HTML look good)
His post mentions
the upcoming floating-point capabilities of the next generation of GPUs and
an SGI paper showing
that this feature is “the last gating factor”. In summary:

[...] you will be able to fit more frame rendering power in a single tower case than
Pixar’s entire rendering farm. Next year.

Whoah.

(It turns out that the Ask Slashdot item in question was talking more about live,
improvised CGI than big movie render jobs, so my kneejerk reaction was doubly
unfair. It refers to Machinima, the hobby
of creating shorts using existing game engines, such as the surfeit of
gung-ho Quake movies a few years back. You do occasionally get some goodies,
though: Nanoflix’s Rendezvous
is cute (and just about worth the pain required to get the Windows-only
engine going). But if you’re looking for something visually gorgeous,
check out the new ILM short,
Work In Progress.)