On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Remigiusz Fiedler <[email protected]> wrote:
> this is a recently started blog with in-depth critique on Blender as a > tool for architectural visualization: > I suspect you are referencing this specific post... http://vrbuilder.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/1-month-self-exam-what-did-i-learn-until-now-ii/ I think some of his "new user onboarding" points are interesting opportunities for improvements, though I'm not so on board with his improvement ideas. I think most of this may be better discussed somewhere else, though I'm really surprised by one thing that seems relevant here... Rendering Speed and GPU rendering speed... In particular, his assumption that GPU rendering (particularly laptop GPU) would so obviously give him faster rendering speed. I see users expect this alot, and I'm surprised by it. For a simple test, GPU rendering on my Macbook Pro Retina (which is a pretty beefy GPU for a laptop), is more than 2x slower than CPU rendering. Are there really laptop combos where GPU rendering is notably faster? Even my desktop GTX670 is only about 1.8x faster than my 2.9ghz quad i7. I know the 6xx have worse double-precision CUDA than the 5xx cores. From what I've read, the real CUDA performance doesn't come until the expensive workstation class Quadro cards. Are there economical GPU choices out there which really blow away CPU rendering? Or is this just marketing driving user interest? Seems possibly worth making a blender wiki page with a combined GPU --AND-- CPU Cycles rendering benchmark table. Does something like that exist? This is all I could find, and it's comparing only GPU-to-GPU performance. http://benchmark.cd3dtech.com/Benchmark/benchmark.html Of course this changes once you get into Quadro cards, but those are expensive.... In the infamous words of a random blenderartist user... "so your gpu has a roughly 10x speed increase over my cpu, which isn't bad at all, although it's also about 10x the price" _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
