1. Of course not. And I didn't say so. 2. I never contested that too. What I did say is that GPU porting of offline renderers is a waste of time better spent

1. Of course not. And I didn't say so. 2. I never contested that too. What I did say is that GPU porting of offline renderers is a waste of time better spent otherwise. And that denoising is solving a problem you would have less off if you didn't waste time with the former. And that 3Delight is proof of that. 3. I never said this was a broad use case. I was making a point in the context of ray-tracing which is the topic of this HNs discussion. But I do assure you: comparing these renderers by other means wouldn't make them look better. > Your 3delight page doesn't say whether they're using binary or ascii .rib files. This is completely unimportant. The resp. renderer plug-ins were used inside Maya and 'render' was pressed. 3Delight didn't need to generate RIB files. Neither did (P)RMan. The Ri API is a C binding that can talk directly to the renderer or spit out RIB. If Pixar uses this in their Maya plug-in, I dunno. Every time I used RenderMan from inside Maya I was working at some facility that had their own exporter. Arnold: I have no idea if it writes .ass files or talks directly to the renderer. In any case, if you checked the numbers on the page for building up the ray acceleration structure it would be obvious to you that any amount of file I/O with the example scene in question is negligible. I know a bit about this. I was maintainer of the Liquid Maya rendering translator at Rising Sun Pictures and wrote the Affogato Softimage to RenderMan exporter there. I also wrote a direct in-memory export that made Nuke render with 3Delight using the Ri (called AtomKraft for Nuke) and was heavily involved in the Atomkraft for AfterEffects. So I can assure you RIB is not a factor in this comparison. Trust me. :) Texturing quality is the same with the caveat that Pixar can only use power of two textures. Which can have adverse effects on memory use and all implications coming from that. Meaning that if I have e.g. a 46k pixels per axis resolution texture I have to upsample that to 64k to get the same quality that I can get in 3Delight using ... well: a 46k texture. Because the next closest power of two I could use with RMan, 32k, will mean I loose 14k of resolution (aka quality) per axis axis. And lastly, apart from that: if you compare texture cache efficiency between those two, I am happy to bet considerable money on who will come out on top. Guess. :] > you are being sucked into some marketing, and missing the bigger picture. What marketing? 3Delight doesn't have any and that page is not known and extremely hard to find even through google unless you enter exact search terms. I do not need marketing to be a tad informed about these topics. I have been using Pixar's RenderMan for almost 20 years in production and 3Delight for a decade.