[Bf-committers] vrbuilder - valuable critique on Blender as a tool for architectural visualization

[David Jeske]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Remigiusz Fiedler <migius at gmx.net> wrote:

> this is a recently started blog with in-depth critique on Blender as a
> tool for architectural visualization:
>

I suspect you are referencing this specific post...

http://vrbuilder.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/1-month-self-exam-what-did-i-learn-until-now-ii/

I think some of his "new user onboarding" points are interesting
opportunities for improvements, though I'm not so on board with his
improvement ideas. I think most of this may be better discussed somewhere
else, though I'm really surprised by one thing that seems relevant here...

Rendering Speed and GPU rendering speed...

In particular, his assumption that GPU rendering (particularly laptop GPU)
would so obviously give him faster rendering speed. I see users expect this
alot, and I'm surprised by it. For a simple test, GPU rendering on my
Macbook Pro Retina (which is a pretty beefy GPU for a laptop), is more than
2x slower than CPU rendering. Are there really laptop combos where GPU
rendering is notably faster?

Even my desktop GTX670 is only about 1.8x faster than my 2.9ghz quad i7. I
know the 6xx have worse double-precision CUDA than the 5xx cores. From what
I've read, the real CUDA performance doesn't come until the expensive
workstation class Quadro cards. Are there economical GPU choices out there
which really blow away CPU rendering? Or is this just marketing driving
user interest?

Seems possibly worth making a blender wiki page with a combined GPU --AND--
CPU Cycles rendering benchmark table. Does something like that exist? This
is all I could find, and it's comparing only GPU-to-GPU performance.

http://benchmark.cd3dtech.com/Benchmark/benchmark.html

Of course this changes once you get into Quadro cards, but those are
expensive.... In the infamous words of a random blenderartist user... "so
your gpu has a roughly 10x speed increase over my cpu, which isn't bad at
all, although it's also about 10x the price"