What makes a production renderer in 2016

Brent Burley, Marcos Fajardo, Alexander Keller, Philippe Leprince, Maurice van Swaaij, Eric Tabellion, Michael Reed
2016 ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Panels on - SIGGRAPH '16  
Even a casual search turns up many renderers that call themselves "production renderer"-some of them relatively unknown, others known to be of very high standard. In addition to these sources, many of the large studios have their own renderers, investing significantly into the resources required to develop this technology. This panel explores the reasons that this is the case, and what it means to call a product "production-ready". !
doi:10.1145/2927383.2927384 dblp:conf/siggraph/BurleyFKLSTR16 fatcat:zzlkqz7cbjcxtmmld3hjpnvv2e