[AND THE HARDWARE TO POWER IT]

Key considerations when choosing hardware for GPU rendering, including insights from industry professionals

WORDS BY PAUL HATTON

A wonderfully modelled and lit plant by Marcos Paulo Coelho. See Marcos’s portfolio at bit.ly/42cgmZj

There is a huge difference between the worlds of CPU (central processing unit) rendering and GPU (graphics processing unit) rendering, had you not already realised. My formative years as a 3D visualiser were spent wrestling with the CPU option. Some of my most frustrating memories in those times were having to wait hours, or sometimes days, for renderings to complete, only to find a change needed to be made and the whole process had to be started again. But what CPU renderers lack in terms of speed, they make up for in feature capabilities and their ability to handle memory intensive scenes.

“I often work with CPU rendering,” says Igor Golyuk, who has created art using both methods. “Since most of the static renders run on CPU, I specifically use Corona Renderer.” When commenting on whether he’ll be utilising CPUs long-term, he adds: “I think that in the future, everything is going to run exclusively on GPU, because GPU provides real-time rendering, and this is important.”

Marcos Paulo Coelho, another talented 3D artist, resonates that feeling. “I prefer CPU rendering,” he says. “For now, the quality achieved by CPUs is superior. However, new technologies have emerged making real-time rendering very competitive in terms of quality, especially rendering time. I have done several tests in software like Unreal Engine 5, D5 Render and Enscape, and the quality surprised me a lot.”

Recent years have seen the tide turning, with an increasing number of artists turning from CPU to GPU render engines. It’s exactly because of the downsides to CPU rendering that GPU renderers have found a gap in the market. The likes of OctaneRender and Redshift have made it possible to achieve incredible results in a fraction of the time, and many artists prefer to lose some features in favour of speed. If GPU rendering wasn’t quick enough, it also has the added benefit of being able to accelerate render calculations using multiple GPUs.