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Denis Villeneuve’s Dune won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2022, and Dune: Part Two won it again in 2025. DNEG led the VFX on both films.
Most of the first film’s post-production happened during the 2020 lockdown. The director, VFX supervisor, and DNEG artists were in different cities, and the sand simulations alone generated petabytes of data.
The work kept moving because DNEG’s artists were already using virtual GPU workstations hosted in a data center. Smaller studios can now work the same way through GPU-powered cloud desktops, without owning the servers.
The Scale of the Dune VFX Work
Dune (2021) has about 1,700 visual effects shots, created by DNEG, Wylie Co., and Rodeo FX, according to AWN. DNEG’s share covered 28 sequences and more than 1,000 shots, NVIDIA reports.
Dune: Part Two grew to 2,156 VFX shots, as VFX Voice reported ahead of the 2025 Oscars. DNEG delivered close to 1,000 of them as lead partner.
Why Sand Made Dune Hard on Hardware
Sand was Dune’s biggest technical load. DNEG’s global CTO, Paul Salvini, told NVIDIA that each grain of sand in a simulation was about the size of a pixel, which “turned into petabytes of data.”
SideFX describes how DNEG’s FX teams built the dunes in Houdini, including a custom dune solver. The largest sandworm shots approached 500 million points.
For Dune: Part Two, DNEG started each worm simulation with about 80,000 large particles and scaled up to 800 million, VFX Voice reported. The large particles let artists quickly test motion before running the full simulation.
Compositing carried its own weight. Nearly every shot included a deep data pass, so the compositors in Nuke worked with very large files on every shot, according to Foundry.
GPU acceleration also helped speed up rendering. NVIDIA reports that with Isotropix Clarisse on NVIDIA RTX GPUs, DNEG artists rendered images in hours instead of days, which gave the team more review rounds per shot.
E-BOOK
Virtual Desktops for CAD Teams
How distributed firms are replacing workstations with cloud GPUs.
How Dune Was Reviewed During the 2020 Lockdown
During the lockdown, Denis Villeneuve worked from Montreal, production VFX supervisor Paul Lambert worked from California, and DNEG’s team worked from Vancouver. This is from an ftrack case study on Dune.
Lambert reviewed shots with Villeneuve every day. He told AWN, “We would all log on via Slack, send him the imagery, and get the feedback.”
Shots from the vendors were reviewed in cineSync, including the worm simulations and ornithopter shots. Lambert said cineSync “kept Dune going even when we were all displaced.”
Home internet was a real limit. DNEG VFX supervisor Chris Downs told VFX Voice that he had to upgrade his connection to review final comps at the right quality and frame rate.
The Virtual GPU Workstation Setup Behind DNEG’s Artists
DNEG began deploying virtual GPU workstations at its Montreal studio in early 2018. The setup ran on Dell servers with NVIDIA virtual GPU software in DNEG’s own data center, and it served about 750 users by early 2020, according to NVIDIA’s DNEG case study. The full build is covered in our post on DNEG’s move for Dune 3 VFX.
Artists reached those workstations through Teradici PCoIP, which streams the screen while files stay in the data center. In December 2020, DNEG’s global head of systems, Daire Byrne, said that once artists moved home, using home networks as efficiently as possible became “key to maintaining the productivity of our team” (Business Wire). Teradici PCoIP is now sold as HP Anyware, which is reaching end of life.
The pipeline helped too. DNEG’s DFX supervisor, Stephen James, told Foundry the studio built a system that automatically loads scans, cameras, grades, and CG into Nuke templates. Every compositor started each shot from the same setup, wherever they worked.
Why Virtual GPU Workstations Mattered on Dune
Files stayed in the data center. In early 2020, more than 10,000 VFX artists signed a petition to work from home because many studio NDAs didn’t allow it, Kidscreen reported. With a virtual workstation, only the screen image reaches the artist’s home, so the project files never leave the studio’s control.
GPU power was matched to each show. NVIDIA reports that DNEG raised vGPU profile sizes and put fewer users on each server when a show needed more power, with no new equipment. Petabyte-scale sand work needed exactly that flexibility.
Heavy media was close to the compute. DNEG’s virtual machines loaded full-frame video from network storage about 10 times faster than a workstation on gigabit networking, according to the NVIDIA case study. Artists at home saw the result without moving the files.
A managed cloud desktop streams their tools over Citrix HDX while project files stay in the data center.
From On-Premises VDI to Cloud VDI: Where VFX Studios Are Heading
DNEG’s setup was on-premises VDI, with servers it bought and ran in its own data centers. Cloud VDI follows the same model, but a provider owns and runs the servers.
The film industry’s own roadmap points this way. MovieLabs, the technology group founded by the major Hollywood studios, set out 10 principles in its 2030 Vision. The first two are “All assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved” and “Applications come to the media.”
In December 2020, MovieLabs assessed whether cloud workstations could support creative work. It found them ready for base GPU creative workstations at 20 to 60 Mbps per user. Color-critical work and pen input requiring under 25 milliseconds of latency were not yet ready.
Display and GPU technology has moved since then. Citrix HDX now supports YUV 4:4:4 color, H.265 hardware decoding, and Windows Ink pen input with up to 4,096 pressure levels. NVIDIA’s vGPU 19 release supports up to 48 virtual machines on one Blackwell GPU.
Large studios are moving in the same direction. In September 2026, HPE described DNEG’s new virtualized workstations on RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, built for global teams working on the same productions. DNEG is back as lead VFX partner on Dune: Part Three, which opens December 18, 2026.
For a studio of 10 or 50 artists, building a private data center the way DNEG did is out of reach. Cloud VDI gives that studio the same virtual GPU model on a monthly plan.
Check List
Citrix DaaS Deployment Preparation Checklist
Running a Remote VFX Team on GPU-Powered Cloud Desktops
Start by sizing GPU power by role. An FX artist running simulations needs far more GPU memory than a coordinator who reviews dailies, so not every seat needs the same desktop.
Then check each artist’s home connection. MovieLabs puts base GPU creative work at 20 to 60 Mbps, and Ace Cloud Hosting recommends 25 Mbps or higher for GPU sessions.
Keep the pipeline the same for every artist, the way DNEG’s Nuke templates did. On a shared desktop image, every artist opens the same app versions, plugins, and paths.
Ace Cloud Hosting delivers this through Managed Citrix DaaS Solutions. Each artist works on a hosted GPU desktop with an allocated NVIDIA vGPU profile on NVIDIA RTX 8000 or RTX 6000 servers, and simulation-heavy seats can be assigned a full GPU through passthrough.
Studios with Linux pipelines can run Linux desktops alongside Windows 11 and Windows Server. The team installs and sets up Autodesk Maya, Blender, and DaVinci Resolve, and you bring your own application licenses.
On GPU desktops, Citrix HDX uses Intelligent Build to Lossless by default, so still frames sharpen to an exact image during review. Project storage is available, hosting runs through SOC 2-certified US data center partners, and the service carries a 99.99% SLA-backed uptime commitment.
For more on how creative teams use desktop as a service, see our page on virtual desktops for design and creative teams.
Get GPU desktops sized for each role before the first shot lands.
