Top Five Reasons Why You Should Switch to GPU Rendering (RedShift)
With the increased demand for GPU based render engines in the animation industry as well as other services that comes with it, we have decided to fill in render farm users at Render Boost with: the reasons why GPU render engines (such as Redshift) will be the next big thing when compared to CPU based render engines.
The idea of using GPU power for rendering is a very luring one. In this article, we will examine whether this idea provides real benefits to make users of powerful CPU based render engines want to switch to GPU render engines.
For years now, the Redshift development team have been working on building a render engine that makes use of GPU power when rendering, they believe that, with the use of GPU power, renderings will be faster and much better as compared to CPU rendering.
The question is: Will GPU-based render engine such as Redshift change the rendering industry?
That question has been answered by Redshift developers with five reasons.
1- Enormous Power and Speed
In a highly competitive world such as that of the VFX industry, success is more than just quality and the kind of content you create. Having the ability to respond to the demands of your prospects faster or going pass rendering hiccups with ease when tweaking or modifying your designs is a vital addition to the success chain.
Looking at the financial side of this, a faster rendering time translates to lower costs on hardware – this is in consideration that a single GPU is equal to the rendering power of up to 20 high-end CPUs.
With a faster render time, artists, as well as 3D designers, will be able to flow and simultaneously make changes to their work without spending hours waiting to see how those changes affect the geometry, light, or shader modification. This scenario brings about a heightened level of creativity, and hence, an increase in the quality of the product.
For artists and users in the animation industry, speed makes up a fundamental part of the reasons for using a GPU render engine.
2- Boosting Artists’ Confidence
With GPU rendering, artists can produce higher-quality work. Effects which are hard to render such as raytraced depts of the field, glossy reflections, motion blur or global illumination can easily be used on 3D scenes – this also includes animations too.
It allows the user to install more than one GPU and up to four-high end GPUs into a single PC – this set up can beat the performance of up to tens of high-end CPU based render farm systems. The good thing about such a setup is that; it comes with a lower cost of electricity, as well as minimal space consumption as compared to space required for an equal CPU based render farm setup.
Above all that, GPU render offers artists great time and flexibility when rendering.
3 – Keeps You Focused and Resourceful Throughout Your Projects
Often, big studios bid for high-quality visuals and, to fulfill this kind of projects with a CPU render engine, they usually make use of their own render farm setup or get the services of an external cloud renderer.
However, there are sometimes when the production scope, size or deadline cannot be carried out using a CPU or cloud-based render farm. Even if a CPU based renderer succeeds to scale through, it will end up eating into the project’s budget or causing the team to miss the deadline.
In such situations, Redshift has shown the world that is it a valuable tool especially for larger-scale studio productions that specializes in producing a different kind of contents.
Before now, artists have been successful in winning projects only to realize that it is unrealistic to fulfill due to high CPU rendering cost and hardware, and this also comes cloud rendering have been considered. But with the advent of GPU rendering, these projects are now a breeze.
4 – Providing Users with A Stress-Free Improvement plan
As small-scale VFX studio continues to grow in its number of employers, and influence in the business so does its operational cost. For studios who find themselves in this kind of situations, moving towards a GPU rendering setup will not only ease their financial constraint but also present them with a platform to further expand their business.
With reference to the fact that a single GPU can outperform multiple high-end CPUs, a small studio will require fewer PCs to get the same result with a CPU-based render. This means, there will be less power consumption, less cooling needed, lower licensing cost, and minimum space consumption. The good thing about this is that computers can be upgraded easily by integrating GPUs into them or on the hand, the upgrade can be done by replacing numerous old GPUs with fewer and new higher-end ones.
5- Helps You to Secure the Future Today
The rate at which Redshift team alongside many big companies are putting their money on GPU rendering shows that it is future-proofed and a better option than the use of traditional CPU for rendering. And hence switching to GPU rendering now will be a smart choice for anyone.
The latest GPUs are already out, made with a state-of-the-art 14nm fabrication technology – with this, the industry has already made a leap into the future of computational performance and hence there will be a drastic reduction in the amount of power required to operate.
Also, these new GPUs will come containing huge memory – this means that rendering larger scenes just got easier. With this kind of advances, there will be a limitless amount of benefits on performance and usability that GPU render (Redshift) users will enjoy.
Looking back at the years and the advancements seen in the development of CPU and GPU technologies as well as the birth of costly and robust processors for render farms, shows that we are going to also see the addition of new GPU and CPU based render engines. With these developments, the competition within the rendering industry will get easier.
At Render Boost render farm, we provide powerful rendering services and support for almost all platform to our users.
- Redshift 2.5.50 for Autodesk Maya 2016-2018
- Redshift 2.5.50 for Side FX Houdini 16.5.268
- Redshift 2.5.50 for MAXON Cinema 4D R16-R19
- Redshift 2.5.50 for Softimage 2015 sp2
