You had a good run, almost a year swapping to the world of the walking dead as you closed your eyes at night. But now you realise your luck is up. You fire off your last 5 rounds watching 5 shambling corpses hit the floor.

Putting the revolver to your head and pulling the trigger to end it, you hear an unfamiliar dull thunk instead of a click.

A split second later the rest of the dead reach you. They bite and tear and you feel the virus spread through you. An insatiable hunger for human flesh grows within you. You slowly loose consciousness the hunger growing.

In the back of your mind you’re surprised as you wake back in your original world. Grogglily you roll over in bed to see your wife sleeping next to you. You watch in horror as the virus you’ve carried back to this world moves your body like a puppet, trapped in a small corner of your mind as you start a new zombie outbreak unable to control your own actions.

Others have covered the topic of modern renders and their shortcuts but if you wanted an exact replica I think films like this are rendered on large HPC clusters.

Looking at the Top500 stats for HPCs the average top500 cluster in 1995 was 1.1TFlops, and today that seems to be around 23.4PFlops.

An increase of approximate 21,000 times.

So 800,000 hours from 1995 is about 37 hours on today’s average top500 cluster.