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.

(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.)