Anyone used ArtVPS

[Da_elf]

gee. my boxx workstation hardly makes any noise and hardly goes over 43 degrees. and i live on a hot tropical island

[davidr]

Hi, I work with tha_blanch, and I've used nothing but Renderdrives for 6 years, and here's my take: we do 1-3 milluion face scenes at 3412x2700, very high-res maps, no DOF (we do it in post), no particles, etc, just straight arch viz shots, and RDs don't cut it. No GI, no caustics, no multi-pass, no plug-in support, no useful user-group, and you have to pay ALOT for software upgrades. The AR350 chips are the same chips that are in our 5-yr-old RD5000, and our new RD5000 (less than 1 yr old) is equipped with...drum roll...AR350s!! Yep, same chips as 5 yrs ago. The cool part, though is that 5 yrs ago they were as fast as 12 Pentium2s, and now they're as fast as 12 P4s! That's Intel-style marketing AKA BS. The speed hasn't increased, and my dual 2.8 running mental ray (raytracing only, with same # of fill lights -all BIG area lights, etc) did the same scene at full res in 24h vs 25h for RD5000 and with much cleaner (RDs are very grainy), better quality. We're switching to Vray on a renderfarm. The 1st advance I've seen from Art-render in 6 years is the newly-announced support for passes, GI, caustics, and bi-directional raytracing (is that the same as bi-directional path tracinf a la Maxwell?). Art-render goes on and on about HDR support, but it's zero-bounce direct light only which you can do easily and as well in any software. Photoreal? It's just a raytracer, so you can do raytracing-only in mental ray for faster, better results for far less money and tell your client it's an unbiased renderer you're using.

[jujubee]

Sold!

It does make sense to leverage the gpu's already in a system though.

I take it Vray doesn't take advantage of the GPU being there. Will there be any support in the near future for this added processing capabilities?

[cpnichols]

you dont think a flexible gpu based system is feasible? I mean if they created one to work with vray, then BAM, shows over. right? I dont know squat about that stuff so Im only guessing. That gelato is supposed to be really coming on nicely though.

Actually I do, that is because GPUs are probably the only thing that is growing faster then CPU's in terms of technology. Plus, GPUs may actually be cheaper.

I used to think that GPU would be the way that the future is going, but I have not seen that much growth in the technology, so I am not so sure.

[meanadam]

I tested one of those machines in 2000.
It is fast for raytracing but it wasn't very production friendly. Maybe things have changed in the last 5 years - but we decided it was too much $$ for too little.

Today if I was spending that kind of money - I would look into a cluster or blade set up. The other important factor not to forget here is: safety in numbers. More machines are more work to maintain, but the system as a whole is much more reliable.

Plus let me just add this: Xbox 360 = $500 (or less).