Anyone try this rendering card yet?

[jujubee]

A friend sent me this link. It's a dedicated raytracing PCI add-in card that dedicates 8 processors to your computer. It runs about $4000 US so I don't think I'll be purchasing this anytime soon. I'm just wondering if anyone has had the pleasure to use one and if it is any good.

http://www.artvps.com/products.ihtml?page=pureoverview

[e3d]

We tried one of the render drives which are supposed to be more powerful than the cards. It was very slow, although the the final result was good. IMO they are not worth the money, you would be better off buying render machines and using vray

Cheers

Neil

[natty]

yeah i agree with e3d
we had one for a month on trial ... good results but not worth £15000...ouch. we havent tested the pure card and i dont think we will

[cocolas]

yeah i agree with e3d
we had one for a month on trial ... good results but not worth £15000...ouch.

yeqah, I guy in our company had a couple render drives and although they were fast and the results decent.....the cost was jut waaay prohibitive...especially for a large scale studio/company...for that much money you could just buy enough comps, networked together and have that much rendering power anyway
not really worth it in my opinion.....

paul.

[mike_kennedy]

I think what most people forget is that you are most likely way better off using a render farm, because buying a sloution like this ties you into a single vendor for rendering while buying a renderer farm allows you to switch software and to also use the rendering farm for other applications aside from rendering.
I have used the render drive, simliar to the pure card, and found it not worth the money...

[jujubee]

Well- thanks for the input. Guess it would be nicer to have more spare machines lying around instead.