I think you’re right about the current state (not quite there, especially in raw $$s), but the potential is finally good enough that folks are investing serious

I think you’re right about the current state (not quite there, especially in raw $$s), but the potential is finally good enough that folks are investing seriously on the software side. The folks at Framestore and many other shops already don’t do more than XX GiB per frame for their rendering. So for me, this comes down to “can we finally implement a good enough texture cache in optix/the community” which I understand Mark Leone is working on :). The shader thing seems easy enough. I’m not worried about an OSL compiled output running worse than the C-side. Divergence is a real issue, but so many studios are now using just a handful of BSDFs with lots of textures to drive, that as long as you don’t force the shading to be “per object group” but instead “per shader, varying inputs is fine”, you’ll still get high utilization. The 80 GiB parts will make it so that some shops could go fully in-core. I expect we’ll see that sooner than you’d think, just because people will start doing interactive work, never want to give it up, and then say “make that but better” for the finals.