like Final Fantasy with a GeforceFX card
I'm not taking a shot at ya, but they often actually make those films with a lot less.
See, the creators run high-end machines with a more-or-less minimalist perspective view, knowing what their tools do and how things are going to turn out. It's the same way a filmaker takes shots of a movie, knowing that once he's done editing and adjusting the color and speeds, things will look different.
Then, once they've finished a set of frames (about 30) they throw it all into a compile dump, which chugs away overnight. An array of machines running multiple graphics processors churn away at the data, producing (the next day) the completed stack of frames, fully animated and rendered at movie-quality.
The frames are then reviewed and either accepted, or re-run the following night. It's a long and hard process. Much of "Toy Story" was compiled on machines running cards you could buy for $50 bucks today. They just weren't machines you could build with on the fly. It's not really practical to have a full-production view, in real time, anyway.
If you want a prime example of the outcomes of these processes, you can view the Extras on the Shrek movie DVD. They show (in the bloopers section) several night's worth of compile screw-ups, with collections of "rejected" screen material where shots were setup with faulty settings.
If you ever get a chance to visit the Dreamworks or Pixar studios, their workstations are a trip!...but looking around the corner you see a Matrix world of little machines that do the actual rendering work.