[Bf-cycles] Speed increase for real production

[Andreas Galster]

Currently I am looking for some ways to integrate Blender into our companies pipepline completely. Until now I was just doing modeling and texturing, but lately there have been some rendering tasks coming up.
Blender internal isn't up to discussion, because we usually need GI. So I tried to use Cycles. Regarding the current features I am very happy with it and I get almost no crashes on a Mac (something completely different on a PC).

The main issue with Cycles (for real production at least) is the speed at the moment. On a Mac with an ATI card it's pretty slow due to no OpenCL. So I was wondering if there is a rough time schedule when new features will be intregrated that make rendering faster.
Such things would be: OpenCL support and other rendering methodes besides pathtracing, like for example irradiance maps? I would also like to know if there are any ways to help speed up the development process. Bug reports, donations, general feedback?

Kind regards,
Andreas Galster
 		 	   		  
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