The art of ethical energy efficient digital visual effects?

I’ve just been reading up on a few articles regarding the forthcoming James Cameron 3D spectacular, Avatar.  What I’m trying to get my head around is just how environmentally friendly this film is given that one of the messages that it preaches is protecting the natural environment.  One thing is for sure, there will have been a hell of a lot of CPU cores thrown at this project – split across a variety of different post-houses and as such, different rendering architectures.

One must consider how many servers (particularly physical dedicated servers) were used to render the film, which primarily features a 3D CG environment.  Modern CPUs such as Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s Opterons now have considerable power saving features built-in to them to ensure that power consumption is kept to a minimum.  A few years ago, this would have been fairly simplistic.  CPU architectures  from a few years ago would have limited control over power consumption in comparison to modern CPUs (for example, Intel’s Nehalem/Core i5/i7 architecture).  And have any of the studios started to virtualise their rendering architecture?

Bigger VFX companies (who regularly buy workstations and rendering systems in bulk) would, I’d imagine,  have arrangements to install early development processors which  include better power saving technology than their previous offerings  (for example, switching off unused cores/CPUs and ramping up as needed or reducing each core’s frequency and ramping up – all of which is now standard features of modern CPU architectures).   My former employers eventually went down the Intel architecture route for the majority of it’s rendering due to power/wattage ratio of the new Xeons that were being introduced just after AMD had launched it’s newest Opteron system.  AMD actually seem to perform less efficiently back then!  Since leaving the world of HPC and VFX, I’ve not used AMD systems at all and as such, not quite sure how they now stack up against Intel’s newest Xeon architecture, based on Nehalem.

In terms of workstations, a lot of companies are buying dual CPU, multi-core workstations and using virtualisation to run Linux on one CPU and virtualised Windows on the other – in effect giving the artist two workstations but only using the power output of one.   In some cases, companies such as Disney have been using the Wine project to allow Photoshop to run under Linux without the need for virtualisation (or buy expensive Microsoft licenses!)

Finally, monitor display technology has improved greatly over the past few years.  Previous to 2005, artists had to rely on big, heavy CRT displays to ensure accurate colour reproduction.  Calibrating them took time – especially if you had hundreds of workstations to calibrate.  Therefore turning them off was not an option, nor allowing them to go into power saving mode.  Thankfully LCD technology has improved to the extent that modern (albeit specialist) LCDs can come close to or match the colour reproduction of the older CRTs and take less time to calibrate.

So I look forward to reading or watching how the FX companies have built up their workstation and rendering architectures required to support such a massive film project, and hope that they’ve done their bit to keep power consumption down as much as possible to back up a film that’s about saving natural resources.