The actual Alpha version of Blender 2.80 shows a lot of improvements for bigger scenes.
I have now imported the cameras of my MODO Star Wars Executor scene made of 71K bricks and adjusted the space lighting with some emission effects for the glass parts in Blender.
All this was done on a DELL XPS 15 with 16 GB RAM, GTX 1050 and actually another 16K picture is rendering on an AMD Threadripper beast with one GTX 1080Ti at my studio Virtual Republic. Update is coming soon.
Remotely controlled by Google Remote Desktop sharing data by Dropbox. Exciting times I never had imagined in the 90th. ;-)