Oh for the good old days, when hidden-line removal on AutoCAD Release 10 would take all weekend, running on an 8MHz AT clone. Fast forward by 20 years, and we find nVidia is threatening our comfortable way of life:
What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs.
Ugh. Now our bosses and bosses-bosses will expect a little something pronounced as "pro-duc-tiv-i-ty."
In contrast, software vendors are chuffed by nVidia getting raytracing to work on its Fermi graphical processing chips. Quoth a Herken of mental ray:
...higher performance on a single [nVidia] Quadro GPU than on a [Intel or AMD] quad-core CPU.
nVidia explains how: "The massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs is a natural fit for the inherently parallel nature of ray tracing."
There is a problem, however. When everybody's ray tracing speeds up, then no software vendor has the advantage.
By "everybody" I mean mental images (iray), nVidia (OptiX), Bunkspeed (SHOT/iray), Lightworks (Artisan/OptiX), Works Zebra (Zeany/OptiX), cebas Visual Technology (Final Render), Refractive Software (Octane Renderer), and Chaos Software (V-Ray/OpenCL).
The two key players are mental images and Lightworks, whose raytracers are used in a majority of CAD packages. Of course, you can fight back and keep your coffee-breaks-due-to-slow-rendering by convincing your bosses not to spend $$$ on a Fermi-equipped graphics board.
What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs.
Ugh. Now our bosses and bosses-bosses will expect a little something pronounced as "pro-duc-tiv-i-ty."
In contrast, software vendors are chuffed by nVidia getting raytracing to work on its Fermi graphical processing chips. Quoth a Herken of mental ray:
...higher performance on a single [nVidia] Quadro GPU than on a [Intel or AMD] quad-core CPU.
nVidia explains how: "The massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs is a natural fit for the inherently parallel nature of ray tracing."
There is a problem, however. When everybody's ray tracing speeds up, then no software vendor has the advantage.
By "everybody" I mean mental images (iray), nVidia (OptiX), Bunkspeed (SHOT/iray), Lightworks (Artisan/OptiX), Works Zebra (Zeany/OptiX), cebas Visual Technology (Final Render), Refractive Software (Octane Renderer), and Chaos Software (V-Ray/OpenCL).
The two key players are mental images and Lightworks, whose raytracers are used in a majority of CAD packages. Of course, you can fight back and keep your coffee-breaks-due-to-slow-rendering by convincing your bosses not to spend $$$ on a Fermi-equipped graphics board.
nVidia Fermi-equipped graphics boards
$1,200.00 - $5,500.00, ouch!
Posted by: Devon T. Sowell | Jul 28, 2010 at 07:56 AM