With upcoming release v.1.3 Presto engine will use both GPU and CPU...
@unknownuser said:
Dear friends,
a lot of you have already guessed what our next tech announcement will be and indeed it is about Presto running on both GPU and CPU. This announcement is probably among the most important ones in Thea Render tech achievements. Unifying GPU and CPU under the same (render) framework is not an easy job. With Thea Presto being written from scratch, we had the ambition, right from the beginning, to harvest all the computer power that is available.
For coding Presto on the CPU, we didn't want just a "port" of the code from Nvidia CUDA architecture to x86/CPU architecture. We wanted to squeeze the CPUs to the max and see a real performance comparison between GPUs and CPUs. For this, we decided to adapt Intel's Embree library. What does this mean? with every GPU and CPU core running Presto, it means fast, very fast, rendering. And this fast rendering is coupled with Thea's material/light system. All in all, pure quality in the shortest render times!
What is also quite interesting is the performance comparison between GPUs and CPUs. We have modeled four scenes specifically for this purpose and ran the benchmarks on various machines (our own plus beta tester machines). It is very nice to see that CPUs stay up to their task and bring a significant speed boost. The actual relative performance between GPUs and CPUs depends heavily on the system and scene type.
[image: IBJr_CausticsBenchmarkLiveScreenshot.jpg]
Actually, to our knowledge, Thea Presto is a unique engine that makes it possible to compare GPUs and CPUs under the same render framework with performance maxed out for both architectures, in a systematic way*. You are welcome to download the detailed benchmark pdf document attached with this post.
Best wishes
Disclaimer: the comparison between the GPUs and CPUs is only made within Thea Presto framework and does not imply any kind of general performance superiority of a specific processor/architecture.
More benchmarks and discussion at related topic http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17%26amp;t=13779