3 ms·
Except that the total cost of investment is a $350 piece of commodity hardware and a free/open SDK. If it's not fast enough, just throw in more / faster cards.
by manvsmachine 17y ago
Except that the total cost of investment is a $350 piece of commodity hardware and a free/open SDK. If it's not fast enough, just throw in more / faster cards. Using Caustic's platform means putting min. $4K into a unproven proprietary platform. If performance/price didn't matter, you might as well say "Not that impressive, considering you can just build a render farm".
No disrepect to Caustic, but I could easily see them going the way of Ageia if they're not careful.
- pmorici 17y agoI see your point but is the target audience for this technology using $350 commodity cards to begin with? High end Nvidia Quadros cost in the range of $4,000. This CUDA solution looks like it provides less impressive results and I don't think a video production company is going to sacrifice image quality to save a buck. If this were targeted toward Joe average consumer than I agree with you.
- manvsmachine 17y agoI think you're somewhat misunderstanding the role that CUDA plays in all of this. You wouldn't need Quadros because the CUDA cards would only need to be responsible for performing the raytracing calculations, not actually rendering the image (unless you want it to). So they could have had 4xGTX295's, equivalent to 8 of the boards used in that presentation, just crunching numbers and then one workstation-class card to render textures, etc if they were concerned about render quality. If someone was still concerned about using GeForce cards, Tesla C1060's still cost only about $1K a board IIRC, and I think they'd be way faster at this sort of thing than the GTX285 used.