Rise of the GPU renderers
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Since I started trolling these forums again I've noticed that more and more software seems to be taking advantage of the GPU... or at least promising to do so in the future. These come to mind:
Currently available:
-iray by Mental Images, makers of Mental Ray uses your GPU to render fast... but it needs an expensive Quadro or Tesla card. Bummer.
-V-Ray RT GPU interactive renderer for 3dsmax.
-Lumion works pretty much like a videogame (and reminds me of PlayStation's Modnation Racers), so it totally depends on your GPU for performance.
-LightUp uses your GPU, too. Right now only for navigation and image/video output, but it has been announced that it will use the GPU for lighting, too.
-FurryBall for Maya uses DirectX 11 to the max with results pretty much indistinguishable from those achieved by production-quality renderers like RenderMan. I want something like this for SU!
-Open Source unbiased renderer Lux Render has a project called Small Lux GPU.
-Octane Renderer has been built from the ground up on Nvidia's CUDA technology, and the video on YouTube of it rendering a 5-million polygon Lamborghini in real time is totally drool-worthy.
-Arion, made by the FryRender guys, also offers GPU rendering.
Closed testing / Not yet available to the general public:
-Indigo has a closed beta version that uses the GPU, too.
-The Serenity Engine combines GPU-generated SSAO and CPU-generated real-time raytracing for cool results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQaS0ucxK4A (I so WANT this!)
-Another mysterious project has GPU-based Photon Mapping!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTuos2lzQpM
Not yet available:
-Thea Render has promised to implement GPU rendering at some point in the future, too.
And there must be a lot more that I'm not aware of.
So what do you guys think? Until now, the best reason to get a more powerful CPU with more cores has been to use it for rendering. But now that rendering seems to be migrating to the GPU, and since SketchUp is still single-threaded...
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Soon we might get 2D output faster with PR renderers than from native SU itself.
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the first video on this page:
http://www.luxology.com/modo/tour/modo501featuretour.aspx
briefly mentions that they weren't able to find much performance increase via gpu but instead found ways to get better performance via cpu..
i'm not arguing one way or another.. just saw the 501 video and thought it might be of some relevance to this thread.
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Not surprising. Those who have successfully implemented GPU rendering have used an engine built from scratch for GPU instead of retrofitting an existing CPU-based one.
The only ones that seem to be able to retrofit GPU usage are unbiased renderers.
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As far as I know, you have missed only 2 in the list :
- twinmotion2, which is using some directX11 effects and both GPU and multi-CPU for rendering.
- Clarisse, alpha version, not only a rendering program but something different...
I am missing time to test them on my new laptop, but, who knows.
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can not forget the twinmotion.
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This has been recognized for some time. See J Bacus's comments in this thread http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sketchup/thread?tid=317eb15d57e0832a&hl=en
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Here's one more, RTGU: http://www.rtgu3d.com/index.php?x=1
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