Octane Renderer

[Benji]

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I knew gpu rendering was on it's way, chaosgroup and others have dabbled with it, but I didn't know about this product.

Looks promising, and affordable.

[tylerzambori]

recommendation removed.

[marcel]

Maybe wait the nvidia fermi...

[Benji]

Yes, the new nvidia cards are apparently purpose built for Cuda - multiple times better than current cards. They might give this renderer a boost as people go looking for reasons to use the extra power......

[tylerzambori]

benji, you mean Octane or TS Dx9?

Marcel, the Fermi might be a little to pricey, might have to wait and see...
I just can't see spending more than $300 for a graphics card.

When It comes out, maybe I can get a better deal on an Nvidia
GTX 295 or something!

[Benji]

I was talking about octane. I wouldn't advise getting the gtx 295 for octane, as octane doesn't support SLI.

They say on the octane site that the gt 260 is the best bang for buck, but the new fermi cards are supposed to have double the memory of these cards (and much better cuda perfromance in general). This is important, as gpu-memory is all that is available for octane, cpu-memory isn't .

It's tricky, but if you can get your hands on a cheap gt 260, that may be your best bet for now. Otherwise, waiting until march when the new cards arrive may be wise. You could also upgrade to a cheap 9800gt or something in the short-term, but I have no idea what the performance with octane is like, and they generally have low memory.

Basically, for all these reasons, I probably won't be using octane until mid-year, when the fermi situation is clearer, and they've had a chance to iron out the bugs in octane.

[trueBlue]

What I found interesting is, if your motherboard can support it, you can have a dedicated card for Octane and another one for the OS. Thanks for the link.

[parva]

seams that many Render companys jump on the GPU acceleration wagon

http://www.randomcontrol.com/arion

Not sure if it will be an update or an alternative to fryrender.
Cool is the combo from GPU+CPU

[DanX]

Very nice render engine. I like the node based texture system and the real-time results. The only problem I have with it is that it seems to be limited to one video card so It would be a good idea to wait until the GPU’s are available with more than just one gig of ram for larger scenes. Would be nice to have a card with about 16 gigs of memory or be able to use SLI enabled cards combine memory of multiple cards.

Very impressive hopefully it will not end up costing 3000.00 dollars plus hardware. Who knows we may end up with new workstations les than half the size of an average laptop that can render entire feature films in a matter of hours on one single unit. That would be nice as well.

[tylerzambori]

recommendation removed.