Seriously, I'm not so amazed by gpu rendering so far. So many highend cards to buy, only to obtain a little improvement at the end, and oh, scalability doesn't seem good as well, not to mention the difficulty to program stuff for it.
I don't understand this gpu hype. They'd better develop new cpu cards, improve software, and leave the gpu for games and display...
Than you are smarter than most and don't fall easily for marketing scam :- ). GPU rendering is indeed still mostly just 'hype'. It's not 10 000 times faster, it's not 10 times faster either. It
IS faster considering its parallel nature and
the fact that GPU chips (by both nVidia and AMD) evolved quite much more than CPU chips did over the last 5 years, but at what cost ? Until Redshift came, you had two options: Fit your scene into mainstream gaming card (Radeon, GTX), which go between
2 to 6GB, but c'mon, 6GB is still nothing. Or, pay for re-branded "pro" cards and get 6 to 12GB of Vram at 10!!! times the cost (Quadro, Tesla for Cuda, and FirePro for OpenCL), at which it was no longer scalable or cheap. It was in fact, more expensive.
GPU rendering is too much tied to drastically changing politics of GPU companies (AMD ignoring OpenCL development at times ? nVidia 'crippling' gamecards to literally force you to buy the same chip in pro segment ? Adding additional memory only when others (gamers, scientists,etc..) need it (so it took 4 years ! to get to 6GB in mainstream, congrats, you can render rotating cars).
Octane render came in 2009,
5 years ago with claims of gpu-rendering to be game-changer, revolutionary act. 5 years later...where is it ? Still nowhere. So maybe in next 3-4 years, it will do better, it might. But really, nothing amazing about it now,
just tons of cluessed brainwashed people by simple (and factually wrong) propaganda.
tl;dr: gpu rendering still sucks. Get over it.
{leg: I own Octane licence, did for many years. I use Unreal/CE3, I love GPUs, just not for pure ray-tracing }
