Kish Fur Test (GPU Render) (Patreon)

So, it looks like the era of GPU rendering has finally arrived!

TLDR: I made the transition from a CPU-based rendering engine to a GPU-based solution for my animations.

For over a decade, I've had people recommending GPU rendering engines to me, claiming that they're so fast they completely eliminate the need for a render farm.  In practice, however, this didn't seem to be the case.  The GPU rendering engines I've tried up to this point have been clunky to use, often missing basic features that I would need to produce anything of acceptable quality, and nearly always missing features I depend on to get the polished look I strive for in my work.  Most importantly, these GPU renderers weren't any faster than the full-featured CPU renderers they were meant to replace.

I should clarify that specialized GPUs intended for rendering (like the Quadro series) have been around for a while, and do provide a significant performance boost, but those are highly specialized, not really suitable for general GPU use*, and often cost more than a new high end PC would cost.  Also, these cards are meant to suppliment CPU processing, not to use a specialized GPU rendering engine.

However, it seems like the tipping point has now been reached, and modern GPU renderers actually can deliver on that promise of speed and quality on consumer-grade GPUs.  Redshift is a popular and very good one.  I tried it out recently and the performance was amazing, but there were some incompatibilities I couldn't resolve (it didn't like my fur)**.

I ended up settling on Vray RT***.  I was already working with Vray as my rendering engine, so it supported the lighting and materials I already had set up.  These test renders show what I got out of it with my old GTX 770.  To my surprise, it handled the fur, global lighting, materials, and object-based motion blur with no issues, and rendered in about 1/3 of the time that the CPU based engine could have produced a scene of similar quality.

So, with these results in mind, I just ordered a new RTX 2080 TI card, which should speed up the renderings by an order of magnitude over the 770 (which I'll still be able to use for rendering because this GPU engine supports multiple rendering devices).  Hell, if this works out well enough, I may eventually invest in multiple RTX cards.  I think my motherboard can support up to 3.  LOL  For now though, I'll just see what I can get out of one, and then go from there <=)

Also, Kish recently got a new PC, which also has an RTX 2080 TI card.  So I'll be using both machines for rendering when I'm ready to knock out this project!

The new card should get here tomorrow and, with any luck, I'll have it set up and going for Saturday's animation stream ^.^

Edits:

* The Quadro is actually fine for general GPU use, but just isn't worth it for the price compared to the GTX/RTX cards.

** Redshift actually renders my fur very well now.  When I made this post, I was testing an older version of both Redshift and Ornatrix which weren't compatible at that point, but the newest versions are.

*** After working with the trial version of the Vray GPU renderer for a bit, I'm less satisfied with it than I was initially.  It's less compatible with its CPU version than I originally thought and significantly slower than Redshift.  I'm now strongly leaning towards Redshift as my new engine, but I expect the Vray GPU renderer to be a strong competitor in the future.