[unsignedqword]

Kind of - it depends on the artist you talk to. OpenSubdiv utilities have been part of the major 3D packages for about a year or two now, and it's true that they can offer some significant speedup, well-needed in both the games and per-rendered CGI industries where high-poly subd models can easily go up to several million triangles.

Besides the speedup, there is a very interesting feature of OpenSubdiv - local edge creasing. To influence the general creasing or smoothing of a subd mesh, an artist usually has to add more or subtract geometry in an area, respectively - whereas OpenSubdiv gives you the alternative option to assign a crease value to an area of the source mesh which influences the apparent creasing of the resultant mesh in that area without the artist having to add more geo. It works some of the time: not every artist likes using local edge creases but for those that do, it can be a very big help, considering the the occasional difficulty in adding new geometry to a mesh that flows correctly and doesn't accidentally ruin the rest of the mesh.