In the 80s, rendering a few minutes of CGI meant leasing a $15M Cray X-MP supercomputer—the same hardware the military used for nuclear bomb simulations.
Digital Productions pulled this off for The Last Starfighter (1984), upgrading from a Cray-1S to handle high-res spaceship renders. This was bleeding-edge compute at the time, and it cost more than most studios' entire budgets.
Today, a consumer GPU can outperform that Cray in raw FLOPS. Wild how far rendering tech has come—what once required a military-grade supercomputer now runs on your desktop.
Digital Productions pulled this off for The Last Starfighter (1984), upgrading from a Cray-1S to handle high-res spaceship renders. This was bleeding-edge compute at the time, and it cost more than most studios' entire budgets.
Today, a consumer GPU can outperform that Cray in raw FLOPS. Wild how far rendering tech has come—what once required a military-grade supercomputer now runs on your desktop.
