Thank you for the detailed reply, it was quite helpful.

A couple follow up questions:


Regarding texture memory:

1) are textures loaded into memory as 32 bit per channel? Or at the native bit-per-channel of the image?

2) are there any issues mixing bit depths in a material? For instance, a 16 ...

So, I've been holding off from upgrading my local renderfarm pending a decision to go CPU or GPU based with new gear.

I recently saw a video of octane (the blue semi truck motion blur example), and that really put the hooks in me to go GPU and use octane as the render engine.

Primary 3D app is C4D ...