| > What sort of studio do you work at? Wrote and sold software into the VFX industry. Most notable Deadline, a fairly popular render manager. Also wrote/sold another dozen or so tools into the industry. While CPU renderers are popular among the old crowd, no one wants to use them because they are super slow. The cycle time is brutal and it kills artist productivity. Artists want redshift, octane, GPU cycles, and hybrid Pixar Renderman, basically anything with multi-GPU support. Wherever artists can they want GPU-based renders because they are fast. Large feature film shops are laggards in adopting new technology and often have a ton of workflows/plugins that can not be easily changed. They have their tired and true pipeline. But up and coming studios tend to be nearly completely GPU-based, because it cuts costs, even if it limits things a bit (but much less than before.) This is also why you see Unreal Engine getting into architectural rendering -- again because it is a much nicer workflow than waiting around for a few hours for V-Ray to finish up. Many children TV shows are GPU-rendered now right out of game engines, in part because of the cycle time and the lower visual complexity of the scenes. So I think we are both right. Large studios are using CPU-based rendering -- you are correct. Artists and more nimble studios are using GPU-based rendering as much as they can because it reduces cycle time while being roughly equivalent costs (well except for the last 2 years because of crypto screwing up GPU prices.) Remember my original statement you took offence to was: "3D artists these days want their render boxes to be filled with gpus so they can use cycles or redshift or octane to render fast." and "The reason why most artists highly prefer gpus is it gets their cycle time down. Farms often use CPU’s still because of cost and less pressure on a single image render time." I was speaking about what artists want and I am absolutely correct on that. And what artists want will filter into the rest of the industry -- although a bit slower now because of stupid GPU prices. |
You again try and say the big studios are laggard in adopting tech, and have tired pipelines. That's not why they're using CPU rendering. It's because GPU renderers did not scale to meet their needs.
A lot of the big VFX studios are renderer agnostic (e.g ILM), and would have no issue adopting GPU renderers if it met their needs.
You're continuing to project your subjective (and frankly incorrect) opinion that GPU renderers have superseded CPU renderers already onto the industry, without understanding the limitations involved.
You even mention "hybrid Renderman" in which I think you mean XPU, but that's yet another example of a GPU renderer that isn't at parity with the CPU one. The same goes for Arnold GPU etc...
"I was speaking about what artists want" is fine, but you're also dismissing the very real reasons people are still on CPU renderers by saying it's a matter of legacy.