Firesteam or Tesla

[Cory_SU]

I hear there are some new GPU's that can be used as extra cores to process information for multicore programs or parallel programs or whatever. Would ASGVIS vray benefit from this thousand dollar card? It is supposed to be something like 10 times faster than a high end quad core.

Cory

[arbolive]

Re: Firesteam or Tesla

i hope so.

there is a new developement of a nice card that adresses correcty the rays during the raytrace process between the cpu and gpu making the wole process a lot faster ( http://www.caustic.com/ ) . they are actually working with brazil render compatibility, but i dont know if they are working on something with the chaosgroup too,(i hope so).

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Firesteam or Tesla

No. Currently V-Ray does not use anything else other than the CPU for rendering. In general, using GPUs for calculations requires completely rerouting and restructuring all of the calculations that V-Ray does. When doing something from the ground up, its much easier to implement these changes, but for a program that already exists, switching over is by no means trival.

[jrharvey]

Re: Firesteam or Tesla

Cuda is something way overhyped that never really took off the way Nvidia hoped it would. It doesnt make sense for developers to write code specifically for Nvidia or ATI cards and not for both. Just that eliminates 1/2 of potential customers. Most applications for the Tesla are medical or geographical stuff. I think its mostly medical stuff though in the comercial world and even then its a small niche of the market. There are some really bad raytracing renderers that you can download just for showing off but they dont do much. There is however Gelato. It doesnt use Cuda as far as I know but somehow it does use the GPU to accelerate raytrace rendering. The quality gets 2 thumbs down though. Its not very good at all. Really only good for very small and basic renders. If you want to see something exciting you should take a look at Caustic Graphics and see what they are up to. They developed a card that is specifically designed to handle raytracing in a very accelerated way. If I remember right it uses both your CPU and GPU to accelerate the process but I cannot be sure. Just like Cuda, I am sure you would have to develop software specifically for this card but its a good start.

[Cory_SU]

Re: Firesteam or Tesla

Thats too bad, I was really hoping something like this would dramatically reduce the waiting time when rendering. I guess buying more quad cores is the way too go.