Hey, there’s nothing like an industry brief on technology that pushes your agenda. amirite? Yeah for agendas! and YEAH for CPU’s and the power they have to push the limits of rendering. Huzzah!!

Hugs for multi-core and hugs for photon-dicin’ render divas showing us what kind of power the CPU has to do it. Among the mix, Luxology (modo), Luxion (Keyshot) and Next Limit (Maxwell). What are they saying? You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it yourself. Enough hype for ya yet? Overclock me baby.

Keyshot’s Dr. Henrik Wann Jensen in response to how to configure hardware for optimal performance:

“Simply add more CPU cores—which is quite a contrast from relying on GPU-based rendering, where you often have software that’s optimized for a specific graphics card, which might be replaced the following year. Being able to leverage the raw compute power in CPU’s definitely gives you an edge.”

and Allan Hastings of Luxology:

“Modern GPU’s offer a brute force solution to ray tracing, but the memory available to GPU’s is relatively limited compared to the system memory available to 64-bit CPUs such as Intel Core i7 and Xeon processors. That means that GPU’s typically can’t handle the huge scene files required in full-scale production rendering, which may involve tens of millions of polygons and hundreds of high-resolution texture maps. And CPU’s offer greater flexibility in terms of shading complexity and plug-in shaders, which may or may not have been ported to run on a GPU.”

Agree? Disagree? Will GPU’s die off, become so unfordable and pave the way to full-on CPU-side graphics rendering? Check out the full Intel sponsored briefing here (PDF)!

Image Credit: Stuart Rowbottom (rendered in modo)

Author

Josh is founder and editor at SolidSmack.com, founder at Aimsift Inc., and co-founder of EvD Media. He is involved in engineering, design, visualization, the technology making it happen, and the content developed around it. He is a SolidWorks Certified Professional and excels at falling awkwardly.