What they mean is that it was rendered in a way in which it took 1 minute to render 1 minute of footage.

Instead of a typical movie rendering which can take a long time for just a single frame. Like toy story "Our original toy story frames were averaging four hours, which is 240 minutes" - https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-...

Thanks! That makes perfect sense.

It just took a cluster of a thousand computers to do it.

It was run on a single PC with the following hardware: Processor: Octacore Intel Core i7 6th Generation GPU: Nvidia GeForce Titan X (3x SLI)

No it wasn't, that commenter was _guessing_.

A tweet above says it was on a GTX 980 in 1440

Actually I was joking.

They mean that it was rendered in real-time when it was recorded, not that it is rendering in real time in your browser.

I imagine this is a recording of the demo which was streamed in real time, as opposed to being rendered (a process which can take significant time per frame for scenes this complex).

E.g., see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toLJh5nnJA8&t=1h36m47s

for current state of the art realistic characters and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRqMbHgBIyY

for current state of the art real-time architectural viz.

As soon as I thought I was decently smart, this guy started talking... Wow! https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=1h37m44s

These are not complex scenes by today's standards. Geometry's no problem. The shader complexity is a bigger concern, but here it's all hard surfaces.