Modern 3D rendering is overwhelmingly GPU-accelerated. Path tracers like Blender Cycles, OctaneRender, V-Ray GPU, and Redshift deliver order-of-magnitude speedups over CPU rendering. VRAM is the hard constraint: a moderately complex scene with high-resolution textures, displacement maps, and volumetrics easily consumes 16-24 GB.
RT (ray-tracing) cores on RTX-class GPUs dramatically accelerate BVH traversal — a render that takes an hour on a CPU might take 5-10 minutes on an RTX 4090. OptiX denoising further reduces sample counts needed for clean output. For professional studios, RTX A-series workstation cards offer ECC memory and certified drivers; for individual artists, consumer RTX 4090 cards offer the best price-performance.
OctaneRender uses out-of-core texture streaming to render scenes larger than VRAM, but with significant performance cost. For final-frame production, having the full scene fit in VRAM is essential. Multi-GPU setups scale near-linearly for path tracing.