Digital Trends:

As you might imagine, Pixar’s cutting-edge 3D animation demands impressive hardware. Part of the challenge specific to Pixar is that most machines are built for speed, not beauty. That’s why the company built its own systems purpose-built for movie making.

The standard machine at Pixar is powered by a 2.3GHz, 16-core Intel processor with 64GB of RAM, and a 12GB Nvidia Quadro M6000. If the team needs a little more oomph, there’s a dual-CPU configuration with two of the 16-core chips, a pair of M6000s, and 128GB of RAM.

And even those machines are pushed to their limit during an active work day. There are over 100 billion triangles in a small shot, more than even the fastest gaming desktop could handle. Mater, from Cars, is made up of over 800 meshes, and almost all of them are deformed in some way. Add to that the schools of fish in Finding Nemo, or the swarms of robots in Wall-E, and the need to develop software in-house only becomes more pressing.

I’ve got friends who work at Pixar and once got a “behind the scenes” look at the operation. The server room is absolutely incredible.