[CyberDildonics]

> It's sort of the problem it's least competitive to solve on a raw performance, performance per watt or development cost basis.

This is not true for anything beyond running compute shaders on large 1D, 2D, or 3D buffers. Just because something is 'graphics' doesn't mean that a GPU is automatically faster.

> Production-ready renderers like Arnold, Octane and mental ray (NVIDIA's renderer) perform best or are exclusive to the CUDA platform.

Arnold is a CPU renderer, Octane is FAR from what I would consider 'production ready' and mental ray is also a software renderer. Renderman does not use any GPU acceleration.

> I sound like I know what I'm talking about, right?

Not even slightly

[doctorpangloss]

My bad, I wrote Arnold instead of Arion, I mix them up when writing it out. iRay is sort of a feature of mental ray, I guess if you're being pedantic. Octane isn't production ready, but I suppose if you're used to building render farms it's not production ready. It's certainly production ready for someone paying for all those licenses.

> This is not true for anything beyond running compute shaders on large 1D, 2D, or 3D buffers.

Yes, but rendering is a shader on a bunch of those buffers right? That's what I wrote. I'm not 100% confident that you can efficiently render with conventional shaders what they showed in that frame. But I think you can. You could at least cull and tesselate tubes on the GPU, if you really don't want to write a shader.

[CyberDildonics]

> Yes, but rendering is a shader on a bunch of those buffers right?

No. Tracing rays is fundamentally a sorting problem when dealing with the acceleration structure. Rasterizing samples means accumulation of values and weights, which means either atomics or separate buffers (and if you are using the GPU creating a buffer for every core is out of the question). You could sort the samples into buckets and rasterize those separately, but you are again faced with GPU partitioning at the very least.

There are plenty of ways to use the GPU to do all aspects of rendering, but it is not even remotely as trivial as you are making it out to be.