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A poster of Ne Zha 2 is on display outside a cinema in Beijing on February 6, 2025. The blockbuster movie has officially surpassed the 2021 war epic "The Battle at Lake Changjin" to become the highest-grossing film of all time in China. Photo: VCG

In the globally trending animated blockbuster Ne Zha 2, the jaw-dropping visuals, together with its seamless blend of story-telling, have captivated audiences worldwide. But there is an unseen force behind the visual feast - computing power, which plays a crucial role in the film's artistically visual effects.

"There are a wealth of breathtaking scenes in Ne Zha 2, such as the flowing of lava, the waves of water, and the water tornado of the dragon king," Xia Hai, director of the Construction and Development Department of Gui'an New Area Science and Technology Innovation Industry Development Co, told the Global Times.

The company operates the Gui'an Supercomputing Center in Southwest China's Guizhou Province.

The Gui'an Supercomputing Center contributed 40 percent of the computing power required to render these intricate scenes in Ne Zha 2, said Xia.

In animation production, rendering quality directly impacts the film's visual presentation. Ne Zha 2's ability to deliver such a stunning visual experience can be attributed to a combination of a highly skilled special effects team and cutting-edge rendering technology, industry insiders said.

The realization of these effects requires the collection of vast amounts of data, refined into information and content, necessitating extensive artificial intelligence (AI) for training, and the provision of high-quality computing resources, they pointed out.

Shenzhen Rayvision Technology was among rendering service providers for Ne Zha 2, the company's shareholder said in an open platform for investors.

"We harnessed a significant amount of computing power from the western part of China, especially from the Guizhou's Gui'an Supercomputing Center in Southwest China, providing strong support for the rendering of Ne Zha 2," said Zou Qiong, general manager of Rayvision Technology, who was quoted by CCTV news.

"Many scenes in Ne Zha 2 were created through complex computer processing, which highly relied on computing power, said Zou.

For instance, the reflective dragon scales in the film require 12 layers of material rendering, with a peak computing power of 3 quintillion operations per second, and the data volume of a single frame reaching 800 gigabytes, according to CCTV news.

For a long time, insufficient end-user computing power and high post-production rendering costs have been pain points restricting the development of the domestic film and animation industry.

The "East Data, West Computing" project has provided an important solution to those issues and provided solid backing for the film-making.

In recent years, China's film industry has achieved significant advancements in special effects, rendering, 3D, and AI-driven filmmaking technologies, especially the success of domestic animated films, elevating China's filmmaking capabilities to new heights. Such progress is inseparable from the robust support of high-performance computing power.

For example, Xia said that Gui'an New Area Science and Technology Innovation Industry Development Co provided computing power for the after-effects of many films and videos, with its Shenzhen-based partner providing algorithms.

"Rayvision Technology has collaborated with Gui'an Supercomputing Center since 2020 to optimize rendering processes and improve efficiency," said Zou.

These were examples of the practice of China's "east data, west computing" project. According to Xinhua News Agency, the project aims to enhance the data storage and processing capacity of the country's western inland regions for data from economically advanced eastern regions.

The Gui'an New Area in Guiyang, Guizhou has by far introduced 23 data and computing centers, making it one of the regions with the richest domestic intelligent computing resources, according to statistics from the Gui'an Supercomputing Center.

Through clustered computing power centers, Gui'an Supercomputing Center can cut rendering time from an estimated 600 years on a single server to just a few months, with certain scenes being completed within hours through parallel processing by thousands of servers, Peng Benqian, a manager at Gui'an Supercomputing Center, told the Global Times.

So far, Gui'an Supercomputing Center has participated in the rendering of more than 150 films and television series.

The center commenced operations in late 2020. With 1,000 high-performance graphics processors and over 700 servers, it boasts a combined computing power of 15 quadrillion calculations per second at present, a speed unattainable by ordinary personal computers.