Desktops
When working with CAD-software, we tend to need a lot of rendering (ray-trace animations) and extensively use photo-editors. This means that there will be a huge speed-up when using OpenCL. In case of a little mistake in the final rendering, there should not be a question to ignore the detail or go for quality. Now you can just re-render and still make the deadline. In most cases the extra processing-power is needed for all employees and thus the best option is to upgrade the software. You can consult your software-supplier for more information.
But what is most interesting is to get the hardware upgraded. On Apple-computers, unluckily, the support for the stream-processors is lacking. We’ll just have to wait until NVidia and AMD listens to the growing group of OpenCL-demanding users on Apple-computers. Contact us, if you want to be the first to know when this will be possible!
On PCs we can upgrade the computers to have up to 4 stream-processors and thereby provide up to 5 teraFlops of computing power. This will result in real-time rendering of normal resolution images and 50 times speed-up over high-resolution images. We don’t think the efficiency will increase through less lost hours (because creativity happens inside the head when drinking coffee), but it will certainly increase the end-quality because more possibilities have been tried out and the creator was exposed to more visual feedback.
Render farms
When rendering movies and other high quality, high resolution visual material, a single Desktop might not be sufficient. Our default solution is a render-farm (a cluster of at least 5 servers and 1 control-computer) with drQueue. We’re familiar with those Pixar-movies stories that took 3 years to finish rendering. With OpenCL this can be brought back to 3 or 4 months, even with higher demands. Most movies with less complex materials (such as hair) can actually be rendered faster than real-time.
