This is an interesting talk and consideration.
http://www.luxology.com/tv/training/view.aspx?id=536
From my side I fully agree with what Brad and Next Limits are saying: I don’t want to buy an expensive GPU just to do rendering! If they can make both of them work in parallel, I’m fine, but nothing exclusive.
-Gian
This video was discussed at cgtalk and octane forum, and we laughed allot as they compare a 12 (24) Intel® Core™ i7-980X with old quadro cards from nvidia.
If you work with luxrays or octane, even with a small gfx like 8000 series, it is totally different
to “normal” renderers. If you get a old gfx up to 8000 or quadro FX 370, try it.
Next month you are running to the next computer store to buy a gtx 460. 
Cheers, mib
What matters, i think, is that technologies don’t (un)constantly jump from one concept to the opposite! Damn! Multiple CPUs is really great of its own… But if some pluging in of graphic cards in the box can make it even faster, i’ll go with it too! ;D
my conclusion (also before i have seen that video) is that if you compare with cpus and gpus of about the same cost:
there certainly is some truth in the luxology video but of course it also is marketing.
I dont want to discuss whats cool or not 
But im very impressed of Octane:spin:
All established renderers are talking why GPU rendering is so sh*tty, but what tackles me is whether Octane does his job good or not. And it does his job excellent!
I think the gallery of octane talks itself;)
I have an old 9800gt with 512ram. I can work very fast Octane.
The price is also extrem great.
About the Luxology video:
Talking has never rendered a photoreal picture.:eyebrowlift:
“We’re too lazy to try to go GPU so instead we’ll diss it with poor arguments while we eat dust from other companies pursuing it.”
the video is about speed and if it is really true that GPU rendering is 10 to 100 times faster then CPU rendering (they even compared one scene using 2 GPU cards and it did not prove to be not even 2 timers faster (and that with all the feature loos you get because the GPU can not handle it )
Im sure they( other render companies ) are all secretly working in the celllar on Gpu rendering!
It is getting very silent nowadays on the other render forums( beside Octane)
Hey patricks even Octane is 2 times*faster than other renderers, its an advantage:yes:
i think that Octane is a fine product and i am sure others will follow and have some kind of GPU render too … but coming back to the video, we should analyze it from a real world production point of view … and here GPU still needs to grow because right now the limitations are too many. Imagine implementing true physically based materials, sss, instancing, volumetric, render passes …etc. well … this is totally different story and very complicated to implement on a GPU (if it is possible at all). So i dot think it is that they dont want to implement it … just that they realised that its “impossible” right now to port all needed features to a GPU render.
well that’s the point … is it really faster ? according to the video it is not and i guess even they are using a 12 core machine, the GPU should be faster as it is stated many times that a GPU is 10 to 100 times faster… now imagine the GPU with mesh emitters and more advanced materials …etc. how much slower will it be ?
even if it isn’t faster it still could be advantageous since with unbiased renderers you don’t have to spend as much time tweaking settings. the current problem is the missing features (and personally i find high end gpus too loud and too power hungry. :))
Speed is not everything.
Let’s say I have an engine that can render in 0.0001 seconds 20000 quads,but can’t render 21000(it’s outside memory),it’s useful?
No,it’s not useful.
Until graphics card will have huge amount of ram(8 giga or something like that),I don’t think gpu renders are so general to be used in every kind of projects.
From this point of view,luxrender seems a bit more interesting than octane in a medium period of time.
even if it isn’t faster it still could be advantageous since with unbiased renderers you don’t have to spend as much time tweaking settings.
i agree ! and that makes GPU rendering the perfect “preview render” in my opinion (or even final for some kind of scenes) … you setup everything interactive and when you finish, switch to final render …
Patricks, i dont know whether you used Octane?
I dont think the renders shown in the video are from Octane. I doubt it, because if you look the pictures they looking 100% the same! Octane and modo has not the same Color mapppers, how the hell they got equalize it? It looks like the same rendering engine;one with more grain and the other withless grain.
The rendering with the Startrek figure is the prove for my self. Its lit by area lights!
Octane hasnt got area lights yet (since yesterday in the new beta it has, the video is older).
So i dont know why Modo is dissing octane, alltough Octane has a exporter for Modo.
i think its a bussiness thing, because Luxology has a partnership with intel (Cpu-Front).
you could be quite right about the Intel thing … well about the rest of your post … if that would be true, then it would be unacceptable … but i find it hard to believe that a company like Luxology would do such a thing
It hears like Octane can only push 1000polygons:no:
THATs NOT TRUE!
I have about a 600000 tris are consuming only 128MB of your vram(9800gt with 512 mb vram)
With a 1-2 gb card you will be fully satisfied, believe me!
The only thing which can cause memory problem are high enddisplacemnts
I have been playing around with slg(luxrenders gpu that will go into luxrender.7). I have been really impressed with it. It uses both the gpu and the cpu and I guess can even use them over a network on multiple machines. I have been considering using it for animation because at low res standard def.(720x480) the results are close to the same in the same time as blenders internal using raytracing. Maybe a tiny bit more noise… this is with a q6600(4 core) and 9600gt graphics card. I have a hard time matching the lighting that luxrender does so easily… And caustics(water and glass) without ray tracing just does work for me.
High end displacement is what interest me…and high res texture(4 or 8k)
Of course Octane is really promising and if,for example,you’ll have to do product rendering with a light studio setup(or hdri) the memory problems are not so important,but if you need more geometry it’s limiting IMO.
Anyway,it’s good to see innovations in the field.
Kakapo
that is right which is why I am not so much after unbiased anymore.
The right software and the right settings and your human eye cannot
distinguish it from an unbiased engine.