4. In either case I will be upgrading my rendering station (one that got hit and was fixed very quickly without taking time to do full water cooling and stuff) later this year to a machine with 4x 1080tis. Preparing scene with many characters and rendering has been a bottleneck for us… and this will help to get as much out as possible.
I'm getting a new-found appreciation for 3D games, eg. Skyrim (which btw. is by no means the best in terms of graphics quality; just picked something that I find acceptably pretty), which give us beautiful renders on the fly - with decent FPS.