GPU Rendering Solutions

This video shows some of the capabilities of DX11 - and it really shows off how good things can look in today's games. The amazing thing about this is that all this looks this good in realtime - no need for hours and hours spent on rendering.

Which makes you wonder... how come it takes so damn long to render good looking stuff in our 3D software, if you're using mental ray or any other renderer, when all the games do it on the fly?

Recently there've been a lot of advances in GPU rendering [rendering using the power of your graphics card, as opposed to the normal CPU-based method]. This used to be reserved only for those who had the extra cash to spend on workstation-level graphics cards... but now those techniques are available and working on normal gaming-class cards as well!

These are some examples of realtime renderers:
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/

It's nuts... you can render reflections, refractions, soft shadowing, render passes, ambient occlusion, global illumination, etc, etc... all with your graphics card, sometimes 300 times faster than a normal CPU renderer. I've only tested Furryball for Maya, and it works great.

Here's a good link for reading up on realtime and offline rendering advancements.

And those of you who are into the hardware tech stuff, check out Nvidia's new line of Fermi & Tesla based GPU-based cards, and what they can do. That's the future right there.