[dagw]

I was working at a small animation studio back when the GeForce 256 was released. I distinctly remember one our animators buying one, popping into a 'random' Wintel machine, installing Maya, and having it run many of our scenes comparable to our very expensive SGI and Intergraph workstations. Everybody instantly realised that this was the future. 2 years later virtually the entire studio was running on commodity hardware costing less than a quarter of what we used to pay for workstations.