I have been reading several posts about Gelato and its support in Blender but have been unable to find a simple comparison of how much faster a Gelato render is (say, with something like a GForce 8800). Does anyone know of any good comparison benchmarks? I dont want to put out that kind of cash unless I know I will get a significant improvement.
Isnt blender using CPU to render stuff? if so, the comparison cant be made, youd have to bench all CPU models and all video card models and compare the results that would be a mess.
Gelato yes, but Blender uses the CPU does it not? which is why we’d have to bench everything and make a huge chart.
An exhaustive comparison isn’t necessary. I just want someone to run a complex scene (AO, SSS, etc.) with these two cases and compare their total render times:
- Normal CPU render (no gelato)
- Gelato GPU render with (expensive) video card, like the GForce 8800 or similar.
I know its an apples to oranges comparison, but if #2 is like 5-10x faster, I would consider shelling out several hundred dollars to improve my render times.
Quad-cores do a pretty good job at rendering if you ask me, or do you already have one of those?
My suggestion is to ask this in the Gelato export script thread.
Get the free version and do your own comparison.
It might well be an “apples and oranges” question.
My limited experience with using GPU stuff is that you can expect it to rapidly produce a good output but that you might have to do more to it “down-stream.” It’s basically going to produce layers for you. If you’re used to creating complicated node-structures to be munched by the software renderer so that it laboriously produces a perfect image for you… perfect when you finally get it… hardware rendering is not going to produce the same work-product. What it does, it does fast, but there will probably be more post-processing steps. Everything has its price.