It certainly is; was an amd fan till i got this i7 3 years ago; not looked back. It’s getting a little old in the tooth so considering upgrading when can afford. Hoping 2.62 is decent ATI rendering as I really don’t want to have to change the 6950 (2gig) I have and go nvidia; always preferred ati.
i like the competition between intel and AMD
i guess it’s the only way create pressure so they move faster to move advance technologies!
but with new Intel super GPU coming this spring i think intel will take the lead for a while !
or may be AMD will come out with some new ones hope so
keep the pressure and we bebefit from it ! LOL
just hope blender can use this new super GPU very soon !
happy 2.6
Yeah that is the end of moore’s law…
Hopefully by that time new technologiescan be used such as
molecular computers http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dna-computer2.htm
or even quantum computers.http://www.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUWfod_8JsM&feature=relmfu
@bizla: It usually goes that fast for the competition (weird hey, lol). So anyway, the models and everything was simple (in appearance) and because of alternative methods, there was no baking time involved either. What took the longest was the modeling and the rigging. The nodes also took a long time (I had three render layers), but let’s not dwell on that.
How are you doing with Cycles so far?
@marius, yeah i bet it will fly past and ill be abolut half done when i realise that ive only got a week left lol 
ah i can imagine how long the rigging took, although i dont know what your working on i know it took me bloody ages to do a terrible rig of my woman model lol. oh dont get me started on nodes lol, it baffles me, its the one part of blender that i have never looked into, eppo has gave me some example files but i still dont know what most of it means :S do you know of a decent tutorial that can show me the basics of nodes?
other than that though yeah the cycles has been going well, ive been getting some gorgeous results with it xD
@writerBlock, thats one nice GPU 
i have the 1GB model and mine handles brilliantly, im hoping so much that AMD gpu rendering will be available in the next update, any idea when the next update is due?
@RickyBlender, i agree the competition is what keeps our tech moving at such a good rate, but from looking at AMD’s structure for the next 4 years i think it will an very close battle between amd and intel, probly the closest we have ever seen it, as this year they are planning to bring out the 4GHz 8 cores (currently the bulldoser is the most powerful on the maket at 3.6GHz x8) next year its supposed to be 4.3GHz stock, the year after 4.7GHz, so i think AMD has still got a fighting chance with the CPU’s, about the GPU’s i dont know though, i can imagine intel will dominate, although currently AMD are ahead of nvidia on the power of their top end cards.
Maybe I should do one on nodes 
(still learning, but people will be able to get started).
I know Andrew made an exceptional e-book on nodes called the Node Encyclopedia. But for that you have to pay (if it’s still available; it came out around 2.5). I don’t have it, but saw the video on it and wow, it was very detailed :).
The rigging was done extremely simply, but it helped that my characters were extremely simple, almost clay-like.
I’m surprised to find that Andrew hasn’t tackled it in a video though (nodes).
Glad you’re managing with Cycles!
I found an introduction to nodes on blender guru ^^ although its made for 2.49 the nodes editor is largely unchanged so that tut works well for 2.61
oh now you really caught my interest ^^
thank you
Hope it helps, but I know that that one is on bricks? It’ll help with Cycles, but the final compositing nodes are a bit different, though the pipe-line principles still apply.
setting up the whole node system went exactly as it shouldve, but when it came time to apply it to the material there was no option for it in the material pane, why the hell cant cycles be properly intergrated in blender like the original blender render was 
When I tinkered a bit with Cycles I remember it being applied just like BI. You add your new material and then click on the node icon just below the materials list and that takes you to the material node editor and whatever you do there is automatically applied.
(all speaking under correction of course…)
damn, its not doing that with me, maybe theres an option ive forgotten to apply, would you mind having a look at this screen shot and see if ive gone wrong anywhere?
the left half is the realtime render update, and as you can see it has no texture to it, the one in the middle is my nodes settup with pattern spec normal and colour, and the right one is in the materials panel
how come you mat nodes for BL while in cycle nodes
that won’t work with cycles
cycles has it’s own mat system with nodes!
salutations
Oh really? i have no idea how to activate that, could you walk me through it please?
wow… Guess we need to start in a right place in beginning.
You DO NOT open TEXTURE NODES from very beginning. One you need is MATERIAL nodes (or World, but that leave for later).
Then feed color information (texture, rgb slider on node) into yellow inputs of to active object assigned Diffuse or Glossy or Glass MATERIALs or their MIXes. Mixing done via Fac inputs manually on MIX node or by MASK textures.
Simply keep Node editor and 3d windows open, select object and say New Material, Use Nodes. You’ll see it immediately in Node editor - Default will be Diffuse, white…connected to Output node…
Start from here - in node editor Ctrl cut line to output, Shift-A Glossy, connect to output and so on…
ok i think i get it now, i’ll redo it (seriously i cannot find any tutorials for people who have never once touched the nodes tab)
All materials and textures have to be re-applied in Cycles. There’s no bridging system between BI and it (it’s why I suggested it a while back as a new Cycles feature).
@Marius: So how would you distinguish, when to use Glossy,red or Diffuse,red or combination mix to import some red from BI? Judging by specular usage? Glass when alpha is used? Needs human interact imho, since there’s no direct comparison between BI and Cycles materials (ways, how materials are done)
yeah his are pretty simple to settup, i done one similar to that last night im manage, thanks for the help
only thing that pass from normal mat to cycles mat is the basic color of mat and UV unwrap !
but that’s about it
and yes it takes some times to get use to the new cycles mat
and still trying to figure out the logic behind the nodes in cycles so just practice and you’ll get the feeling of it but not the logic
cause nodes in cycles are base on probability of rays
so very difficult to understand it from a logical point of view !LOL
anyway you have to follow all the threads on cycles and learn from these over time and take notes
or you can ask questions like here in thread i guess and you’ll get help
but it’s like anything else in blender need to practice to get perfection!
salutations
salutations