I haven't moved any goalposts.
Arnold has only been GPU accelerated for a few years - not since 2013. Same with Renderman - XPU only came out this year, and still doesn't support everything on the GPU, including custom shaders (like Arnold GPU doesn't).
Mental Ray really isn't used anywhere. It sort of died like more than a decade ago.
Honestly, I used it back in 2003 in the VFX industry, but not since.
You have to be mistaken here. No one uses Mental Ray that I have heard of in production in the last decade. Probably someone does, but not anyone serious.
Autodesk doesn't even sell licenses of Mental Ray and I believe you will find it hard to buy them from NVIDIA as well: https://www.autodesk.com/products/mental-ray-standalone/over...
Are you thinking iRay? Still made by NVIDIA and uses GPU acceleration.
The default renderer in Maya, 3DS Max is Arnold these days, others use V-Ray, RedShift, Octane, RenderMan, etc....
You didn't say "feature films", you said "film and TV." You're goalpost-shifting / no-true-scotsman'ing.
> it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around).
The Arnold I mentioned that is GPU accelerated? Or a different Arnold? Just checking.
> high end VFX facilities
Again with the goalpost shifting / no-true-scotsman-ing
> aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.
They doing that rendering work on laptops?
What is the article talking about? Server farm hardware?
We're done here.