Original Post

In the late 1970s, Ed Catmull at the University of Utah developed foundational graphics methods like z-buffering and texture mapping. By 1979, he joined George Lucas at Lucasfilm, forming the Graphics Group. Their work—eventually named RenderMan—required computers able to handle massive floating-point multiply-add (FMA) operations per frame.

DEC and later SGI supplied the advanced workstations for this. LSI Logic, as ASIC supplier, manufactured custom chips for SGI and DEC, with future Nvidia founder Jensen Huang working at LSI, gaining direct insight into these compute needs.

In 1986, Steve Jobs acquired Catmull’s group, renaming it Pixar. Pixar’s RenderMan software, released in 1988, let filmmakers program surface appearance and light. It became the gold standard for photorealistic animation and VFX, used in films like Toy Story, Jurassic Park, and The Lord of the Rings.

RenderMan was and remains licensed to nearly every major studio, including ILM, DreamWorks, and Weta Digital. The RenderMan division at Pixar/Disney is estimated to generate tens of millions in annual licensing revenue, with pricing for full-feature licenses for major studios running from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per production.

During the 1990s, SGI and Pixar coordinated to optimize hardware for RenderMan. LSI Logic continued supplying custom floating-point engines until Jensen Huang left to found Nvidia in 1993. By 2001, Nvidia shipped GeForce 3 with programmable shaders, applying the same FMA-heavy computation that powered Pixar’s rendering to the real-time world.

Procedural graphics experts like Inigo Quilez brought fragment shader techniques to Pixar (notably for Brave), and later spread these ideas globally via ShaderToy.

In 2012, Ilya Sutskever and colleagues trained deep neural nets on Nvidia GPUs, using the same floating-point architecture developed for graphics. Today, language models like GPT run on this hardware. In 2024, Catmull joined Odyssey, linking AI and graphics once more.

The thread through all of this is the industry’s demand for scalable floating-point multiply-add operations, first for movies, then for AI. RenderMan, its clients, and the supporting hardware have shaped the evolution of both visual effects and artificial intelligence.