I don’t know much about the current state of GPU processing. I’m thinking of buying a new graphics card in order to render iray with maya 2014. I can’t afford a quadro and I gather they aren’t the best buy anyway. Any recomendations? My system is an i7 running winows 7 and 16gigs of ram.
cost effective card for iray and maya
cgbeige
#2
iRay isn’t officially supported in Maya. Don’t bother buying a GPU for rendering unless you’re looking to use Octane or a dedicated GPU renderer. GPU rendering is overrated IMO - I have access to VRay RT and I don’t use the GPU modes because it’s too limited compared to the CPU version.
rochre26
#3
Thanks for the advice David. Can you elaborate what it is that isn’t there yet with gpu rendering? I’m aware of some problems but they seemed like they might be worth it dealing with given the increase in speed.
also, thanks for your facer script. I use it quite often.
cgbeige
#4
There is a good talk by Brad Peebler from Luxology about the limitations of GPU rendering here:
http://www.luxology.com/tv/training/view.aspx?id=536
Basically it boils down to this: because GPU rendering can only do unbiased progressive path tracing, it’s not faster because you get a lot of noise so it takes longer to resolve a final image. and many of the things you can do on a CPU can’t be done on a GPU. V-Ray RT doesn’t do SSS, for example although some GPU renderers do, they are still heavily limited by the memory capacity of your video card.
imashination
#5
All copies of that video have been pulled from youtube, vimeo and the luxology website… I predict they’re working on gpu rendering and have pulled the video so as not to look silly, though what was said in the video was pretty much spot on and accurate at the time (3 years ago I think?)
cgbeige
#6
I’ll believe that when I see it. The GPU limitations aren’t going to disappear overnight. If they do something with the GPU, it’s probably going to be how it’s used in Katana just as a preview renderer.
olson
#8
Hmmm, interesting. I seem to have found a copy of it in my downloads folder. I think I’ll check it out. 
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