Raycasting by Intel

[contegufo]

Hi

And 'imminent the new update of STRATA 3d which also includes a new rendering engine (Embree Raycasting ) that Intel also uses the Corona.
From what you read it seems that there are big differences between the calculation of CPU / GPU.

"Why only CPU?
By rendering only on the CPU we avoid all bottlenecks, problems, and limitations of GPU rendering. These include high cost, heat, and noise of GPUs, limited memory, limited shading complexity, limited support for third party plugins and 3ds Max maps, driver problems, and slower development. CPU shaders are faster to write, can utilize tens of gigabytes of memory, and can run on any hardware.

The only proposed advantage of GPU rendering is the speed. But how much faster are GPUs, really? The often mentioned “100 times faster” claim is a myth. According to a recent SIGGRAPH paper, CPUs and GPUs have roughly the same per-$ and per-Watt performance in non-trivial scenes. Empirical evidence from comparing various CPU and GPU renderers also supports this.

As of now, switching to current GPUs is just not worth losing the CPU flexibility and memory. We are however on the lookout for any upcoming technologies – CPUs, GPUs, and other coprocessors.

Intel Embree Ray Tracing Kernels
Corona Renderer uses the Intel Embree ray tracing kernels, the fastest CPU ray tracing primitives on the market. Since they mesh well with the Corona architecture, they are an important factor in its performance."

https://www.strata.com/winter-2015-16-r ... 393f1b611a

[Zom-B]

Cinema 4D, Corona, Lux, Arion, Thea Renderer, FluidRay, NOX and many more for sure use Embree.

Its a CPU only thing.

btw: Embree 2.8 just get released

[afecelis]

This is very interesting, thanks for sharing. If all those renderers are CPU-only, why is there still a tendency to develop GPU renderers? After all these years, and SDKs like CUDA being mature enough, shouldn't GPU renderers make a difference? What about hybrid renderers? I like the fact of CPU renderers not hanging because of memory since you could just add more RAM and crank your memory power UP, but day by day videocards come with a lot more VRAM and whereas a processor offers you up to 8-12-16-32 cores to render you get thousands of cores in a videocard.
About the heating problem, so do CPUs heat up, and worse, your PC become unusable when rendering with CPU whereas when rendering with GPU in the background you can keep on using your computer with the CPU free for other tasks.

It's complicated and I'm very interested in seeing Indigo 4 in action with GPU rendering via openCL. I want to see how those AMD cards behave.

@contegufo: do you use strata 3d? I've seen this program ever since the beginning of 3d programs and I've always found it very interesting. Is it good?

cheers!

Alvaro

[contegufo]

Hi

Strata 3D is initially created on the Mac and has always had a good rendering: It 'was perhaps the first to implement a commercial software algorithm Radiosity since the early age of 90. Unfortunately, the interface is affected but the yield of no pictures is very good and just look at the gallery to see that.
I would not say whether it is more efficient to calculate CPU against GPU but probably render a game is different. Otherwise all 3D software would calculate the GPU. I believe that Indigo has some problem.

Wishes for a merry Christmas to all!

[Oscar J]

I don't think there's a "problem" with Indigo. GPU rendering will be much faster for simpler scenes, but CPU rendering (with BiDir, MLT etc.) will still be faster for more complex scenes and light simulations.

[afecelis]

You're right Oscar. I'm slowly starting to understand and appreciate CPU rendering with Indigo, because of the nice results. The only drawback is the waiting time, but it's totally worth it. I wish Intel could come up with a 32-core processor.

@Contegufo: I tried Strata design CX8 on Mac and It's quite a capable 3d program, very interesting, I'm actually very impressed by its features. Also, the subscription pricing model is very affordable. Thanks for bringing it back to my memory

cheers!
Alvaro