From all features added to Blender in the past few months, I believe that no other feature had the impact of Cycles. Just to be able to render my projects with advanced shaders, global illumination and more is something that most Blender users dreamed about for years. Besides all that we also can use or CUDA enabled GPUs to speedup the render, which is incredible. Do you want to take a look on a scene rendered using two GeForce GTX 580? The video below was published a few weeks ago, and shows a really big architectural scene with lots of complex materials like water and glass.
You won`t learn anything from it, because the video is not meant to be a tutorial. But, it show us how important is to pick a good GPU to use with Cycles for architectural. This could save you a lot of time during render.
The video was produced by eMirage Digital Studio. And for a full description of the hardware used to render this scene, go check out the notes of the video on youtube.
Get out of here …. That is a painfully impressive performance.
Two 580s are not cheap together but the amount of speed you get is much cheaper than trying this with a CPU rig.
I have a quad core Xeon and my single GTX 570 is more than three times faster that for just 260 $.
Do I love Cycles and GPU rendering!