OTOY Forums

here is an article about OCtane and othere GpU renderers
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/201 ... turity.ars

i particularly find this interesting

V-RayRT will be out in fall and available as a free addition to V-Ray in a service pack for both Maya (on all platforms) and Max for Windows. It's based on OpenCL.

dta

Yup. Siggraph was all about gpu rendering. That and 3D. The article covers a lot of the issues still out there for GPU rendering, and like they said, by next year's Siggraph the landscape will look very different. No one is all the way there yet with regards to having a fully complete engine. Its like spending your life designing airplanes and then being told you need to start developing boats. Some very fundamental similarities, but a lot that doesn't translate. This takes time, as we are seeing, to go from a row boat to a cigarette racing boat. I think that Octane is ahead of the pack and the license cost is already getting it into some big named companies.

They should acknowledge more fact how much those things depend on graphic card providers as well. They will mature as better and affordable cards, since neither Quadro nor Tesla is neccessary at all, enter the market. Until then, developers can't simply overcome all stuff, so they shouldn't be blamed "displacement" and whatnot is unavailable at the moment, etc.
The battle is still not won either, soon Intel will release it;s basicly 50+ cores's "Knight's Ferry" (each counting as 4 thread, therefore 256imaginary cores), I wonder how much that will shake up things.

I think that the fact that vray-rt GPU has it's late arrival being one of the results of using opencl, due to probably many platform specific issues, and probably it will be slow.
(if vray developers come and ask how octane runs so fast at our siggraph booth, it's probably the case, i think).
Maybe therefore it's bundled for free instead of being sold like a competitor to octane/arion.

However, we'll have to see what the future will bring.

Radiance

Yeah you should have seen the faces of the other "competition" developers when I said we would be getting MLT. "MLT? You can't do MLT on the GPU. Impossible!"

The gpu does impose a lot of limitations, but thankfully we have Radiance and the team who seem to be able to think around them and keep pushing through. I really can't wait to see the new stuff we'll get with 2.3.

Actually this article was written by a Octane customer named cgbeige. Nice read by the way cgbeige.

I am wondering if APUs will help the devolpers in the future to implement features which aren't that easy to implement on a GPU?


Melese

I have not yet tried in Octane, but I thought that caustics were possible in any unbiaised render engine...

Octane does indeed do caustics, however it's not very efficient at it yet without MLT.

Radiance