GPU rendering is not the magic bullet it was promised to be

[gristle]

Brad (if it is) looks like shit in that still you posted no sleep because of other renderers?

[tungee]

Might i be right with the startrek figures: both use arealights?
Background is black!
Radiance?

[radiance]

No idea.

Radiance

[Garrick]

Stop me if I am wrong but at 2.41 min. into the video luxology are comparing 2 Current state of the art 6 core xeon CPU's too 2 older Nvidia GPUs , first a Quadro FX 4800 and then a Quadro FX 5800”
For there render test.

Btw, this “high-end” older Quadro FX 4800 has 192 CUDA parallel processing cores (Not a fermi GPU)
And the other older Quadro FX 5800 has 240 CUDA parallel processing cores (Not a Fermi GPU)

Also those older GPUs have less than half the CUDA cores of a current and moderately priced GTX 470 fermi GPU.

Links to info.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_qu ... 00_us.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_qu ... 00_us.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/fermi_architecture.html

[radiance]

they did order a license:

date Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:43 PM
subject Luxology -- Benchmarks
signed-by gmail.com
hide details Jun 30
Hi Terrence,

I'm a contractor working with Luxology for the next 2 weeks benchmarking GPU renderers.

Luxology is working with intel to benchmark GPU renderers like Octane, Arion and others to see how they compare to CPU renderers.
Luxology told me to let you know that modo's next release does NOT use a GPU renderer. And therefore we are not in competition.

Radiance

EDIT: removed names due to demand

[prooq]

@ radiance:
mh, I'm not too sure about the fireflies: I roughly recreated the scene, and can't find great differences in the noise.
(3min on single 8800GTS 512)

It is amazing, that the colors match so well, and it definitely is not a fair comparison, but I'm not 100% sure they didn't use octane...

(also interesting that they knew they wouldn't make a gpu renderer, before they bought the license)

[pixelrush]

Well the tone of the video is kind of odd.
To me the man looks like hes had no sleep for 2 weeks and ate stiff cheese all that time.
I think its an attempt to scuttle the success of a competitor who has better technology with some FUD.
You get this low stuff from companies in America.
We just had a similar thing on a Solidworks blog where a PTC employee pretended to be a disaffected SW user and was trolling by stealth for customers.
Earlier on these forums we had some strange posts with a scuttle flavour too and we saw through those and repulsed them.
Luxology's multi-threaded rendering strategy died along with Intel Larabee.
Frankly who cares.
Octaners are very happy.
Lux people can afford both if they want since Octane is so reasonably priced.
Lowlife bullets bounce off Octane just like Superman.
Onward and upward Refractive.

[Chris_TC]

Frankly who cares.

Are you kidding? I care a heck of a lot. If Octane turns out to be no faster than a strong CPU then there's no reason for me to use it at all when there are production ready CPU renderers with all the functionality I'd ever need.

Another comparison was posted a while ago on XSIBase. Arnold (the rendering engine) rendered the Octane benchmark scene grain free in 9 minutes on a single i7:
http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php? ... #msg269380

[tungee]

Chris_TC ,
you can show us renderer A , renderer B....... and so on......
I dont care

[Chris_TC]

Chris_TC ,
you can show us renderer A , renderer B....... and so on......
I dont care

What's so special about Octane if you take away the speed? Nothing. For production scenes there are tons of (unbiased) alternatives with more complete feature sets.