It’s fast, but it also looks completely, utterly stunning. Oh yeah, and that whole thing about how the desktop computer is over? That could prove to be very, very wrong if computers open up these kinds of visuals. Sure, getting two of them is a little pricey, but this essentially amounts to using what once were considered “desktop” cards, not only-for-the-wealthy workstation models. Even the demo above is using NVIDIA GTX 480 cards, which have a street price now under US$500. Here’s the other good news: this doesn’t cost a fortune. I remember Apple making similar arguments about the coming dominance of the GPU years ago, but we haven’t actually seen it enter the world of visuals. With the CPU blazing through audio and the GPU doing these kinds of visuals live, you have complete digital immersion on a basic, affordable computer.) CPUs are still ideal for doing tasks like audio processing, which tend to be less parallel and more dependent on timing. This means the ability to work with photorealistic imagery live on your desktop.ĭo you have a CPU whose day you want to ruin? Show it this chart: This isn’t saving time that you’d be looking at a progress bar, as with many CPU benchmarks.
That makes the render fast enough that you can see it, so fast it can actually change your workflow. Think 10-50x increases in performance over CPU-based rendering: not in theory, or in theoretical benchmarks, but in actual, real-world rendering. Refractive Software’s Octane Render does photorealistic rendering right on the GPU.Īnd it kicks the CPU’s sorry ass.
(A beta license, amazingly, costs just EUR99 during the beta.) Friend of the site Marc has kept us posted on his new employer, and it’s amazing stuff. This isn’t a demo of some futuristic research tech at SIGGRAPH, though: it’s a product in beta right now you can use, today. After all, we’ve been hearing about how raytracing and better-looking, more realistic renders would someday revolutionize 3D visuals, and that, thanks to the GPU, you’d get this power in speeds approaching real-time. You’d be forgiven for being skeptical of what photorealistic rendering’s future might be. (That’s how we put it in highly technical jargon, anyway.)
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