Linux proved itself by rendering Titanic's water, and Hollywood never looked back

Published Sep 21, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Simon is a Computer Science BSc graduate who has been writing about technology since 2014, and using Windows machines since 3.1. After working for an indie game studio and acting as the family's go-to technician for all computer issues, he found his passion for writing and decided to use his skill set to write about all things tech. Since beginning his writing career, he has written for many different publications such as WorldStart, Listverse, and MakeTechEasier. However, after finding his home at MakeUseOf in February 2019, he would eventually move on to its sister site, XDA, to bring the latest and greatest in Windows, Linux, and DIY electronics. Back in 1997, Titanic hit cinemas. With a budget of $200 million, it was the most expensive movie ever made at the time, and it wowed audiences the world over. One of its key visual points was its realistic water, which, when you're making a movie entirely revolving around a boat, is very important to get right. However, while everyone was enjoying the movie for what it was, the folks at Red Hat were happy for an entirely different reason. The production of Titanic used its server farm to render the water, and it was the first big breakthrough that solidified the FOSS operating system in Hollywood. Linux steps up to take on the heavy rendering It was the best choice for the job at the time Before we take a look at what that server farm was, we have to explore why the Titanic VFX crew picked Linux; specifically, Red Hat Linux. Jon "Maddog" Hall, the board chair for the Linux Professional Institute, actually got a chance to peek behind the curtain of Titanic's development. He got that via an invite from Daryll Strauss, a software engineer at the people doing Titanic's visual effects, Digital Domain. When Hall arrived at Digital Domain, he took note of what the artists were using. He saw that the artists used SGI workstations and Windows NT on Intel. The artists would go back and forth between the OSes depending on which one supported the software they wanted to use, but Windows NT had the issue of not implementing withi Digital Domain's Unix-based network environment. Once it was time to render all the special effects (including all that water), it was time to settle on a system that'd work as the server farm. But what should the company use to handle all that intense work? To answer that, we hop over to Daryll Strauss, who worked as a Software Manager at Digital Domain. He published a post detailing his experience, where he recalls what the company was considering at the time. Strauss claims they didn't opt for Windows NT because it wasn't working with Digital Domain's ecosystem, and developing ports for the tools that didn't work on NT would be expensive. The company considered purchasing a lot of Digital UNIX systems, which would play nicely with the Unix environment, but buying all the licenses for each PC would have been expensive. However, there was a clear winner: Linux fulfilled the task very well. It handled every job we threw at it. During our testing phase, we used its ability to emulate Digital UNIX applications to benchmark standard applications and show that its performance would meet our needs. The flexibility of the existing devices and available source code gave Linux a definitive advantage. The only problem was that Digital Domain would need engineers to handle any issues, but they had people on board who knew Linux. So, the company purchased 160 433MHz Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha systems, 105 of which ran Red Hat Linux 4.1, and the rest ran Windows NT. Strauss didn't say what happened to those NT devices, or why they were bought, but it's likely they were used as a backup system or for running specific software packages that the team couldn't get working on Red Hat. Red Hat Linux proved itself in Digital Domain's render farm It required some work, but it did get the job done. Once the systems were ready, the VFX team made a server room in two weeks and got to work. They discovered Linux wasn't perfect; the biggest problem was its NFS implementation, which would drag down the entire network if a central system went down. Boot management was tricky, and getting the right hardware to work with Linux was also a pain point. However, once all the teething pains were sorted out, Digital Domain got to work rendering the water. The DEC Alpha architecture it opted for began to really pull its weight, with Strauss claiming the render jobs went 3.5 times faster than its old SGI systems. Linux also managed to shine: "We were extremely pleased with the results. Between the beginning of June and the end of August, the Alpha Linux systems processed over three hundred thousand frames. The systems were up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were no extended downtimes, and many of the machines were up for more than a month at a time." All that hard work made its way into the Titanic movie's release, and became the first big splash for Linux in the movie scene. In fact, Hall recalls begging Digital Equipment Corporation's marketing department to add that its Alpha architecture and Linux helped make the movie, but the company was so scared of the movie flopping and dragging everyone's name down with it, that they refused the idea. Of course, when Titanic ended up winning an Oscar in 1998, Hall remembers a lot of onus being put on the performance of the Alpha architecture, while Linux was left in the limelight. Linux would go on to become a keystone in Hollywood Titanic was just the start. CGI movie makers began making a move toward Linux around the turn of the 21st Century. For example, after Shrek hit cinemas in 2001, it was revealed that it was "the first major motion picture created primarily using Linux." Pixar initially rendered its own movies using Unix, but after the animation industry decided to move over to Linux, Pixar decided to use it to make Finding Nemo, and has stuck with it ever since. Even back in the Toy Story days, Bruce Perens, the Debian Project Leader at the time, worked for Pixar, which inspired him to name Debian releases after characters from the movie, a tradition that continues today! While cost was a factor in the move, it wasn't the main one. For a start, moving all the Unix code these studios had to Linux was a lot easier than moving it to something like Windows. Plus, there was a real performance gain to swapping out Unix for Linux at the time. As Pixar's Vice President of Technology, Darwin Peachey, said at the time: "The most important thing is to look at what is the best performing hardware. Right now that's Intel-based workstations, with NVIDIA or ATI equipped graphics solutions. These have now eclipsed traditional RISC workstations (such as SGIs) in terms of graphics and CPU performance. Quite apart from price/performance, if you look at absolute performance, it appears that this is the way the industry has to go." These days, Linux is the standard for render farms everywhere to create visual effects and animated feature films. What started as a small gamble from Digital Design ended up powering Hollywood's virtual effects. Linux's heart will go on So, the next time you're at the movies and you see a cool CGI effect, there's an extremely good chance that a Linux render farm brought it to life. Not bad for what started as a hobby OS back in the 90s!