[gianca]

After the galore of announcements at last GDC I'm wondering where Maxwell stands now with its own GPU render capabilities demonstrated last year.
I personally think a little help from the GPU could help a lot Maxwell render times.
In fact I could use that like right now...


Gianca.

[seghier]

i think they announced to use gpu with fire only

[l1407]

i think they will not release forever........., but other render engine will go to real time result....! I don't know MW team thing what anything

[numerobis]

http://blog.digitaltutors.com/dt-exclus ... prototype/

Yes, it looks like it will be for Fire only...

"We are looking forward to developing a GPU interactive engine that speeds up the interactive engine first, and perhaps the production engine later."

This sounds to me like at least 1-2 more years until we maybe see GPU rendering for the production engine.

[T0M0]

IMO we will see GPU powered FIRE in some 3.x update, probably Maxwell 4 will offer full GPU support :)

[itsallgoode9]

I would hope they are rushing to push out their GPU rendering solution even if it's just for fire previews. GPU hardware is to a point now where VRAM amounts are commonly large enough to squash next limit's past criticisms of the VRAM in GPU rendering.

I've been using a GPU renderer for most of my projects lately and GPU rendering has been an absolute joy to work with. I'm a freelancer so one of the biggest benefits of GPU rendering for me is how cost effective the hardware is. I have 2x 780 6gb cards in my machine and it renders faster than my 6x 2600k cpu render farm in Maxwell. GPU sockets mostly stay the same, so in a year or two I can replace these two cards within a matter of minutes for $1,200 compared to building all new render farm for for $6,000+ and days upon days of building and troubleshooting.

For some situations GPU rendering isn't the best solutions (example: if i'm rendering an 8500px render, i'm somewhat limited in the amount of render layers I can use due to VRAM limitations) but overall I prefer it.

Working in GPU rendering, my render quality has improved dramatically due to the improved speed letting me test and iterate much faster. I hope Next Limit listens to the customers and feels the pressure to add this before it gets too late.

[feynman]

Working in GPU rendering, my render quality has improved dramatically due to the improved speed letting me test and iterate much faster. I hope Next Limit listens to the customers and feels the pressure to add this before it gets too late.

That's the executive brief for NL, in a nutshell.