Since the announcement of Octane Render last monday a lot of artists and users are asking themselves, when we will have an open source renderer using GPU technology like Octane. By the quick demo showed of Octane Render, we can clearly see that GPU powered render is the way to improve quality with incredible speed. There are various examples of commercial renderers like V-Ray and FryRender that already have special versions optimized to use the GPU in real time render. At the comments of that article a reader called OIB point out an interesting discussion at the LuxRender user forums, which I really missed out when it started back in November, showing a few experiments with LuxRender and OpenCL.
An artist and developer called David Bucciarelli is working on some experiments with LuxRender using GPU power to render 3d scenes in real time. So far it`s only a test and there is no guarantee that anything will be released in a future LuxRender stable release, but it`s quite nice to see this first tests.
If you want to know more about the SmallLuxGPU developed by David visit this link, and you will be able to download the source codes and binaries for windows and Linux.
The video below shows the SmallLuxGPU in action with a quick demo of LuxRender using GPU power.
SmallLuxGPU (OpenCL) from David Bucciarelli on Vimeo.
At the description of the video in Vimeo, we can find more information about the software and hardware used to create this test.
It is a rough test but shows that we can expect a lot more in the future developments of LuxRender, and I hope other renderers. So far, Octane Render is the best and reliable example of GPU render I saw. With more time and development, we will see a stable release soon.
For architectural visualization artists, this will be the end of the infamous render test and the design of environments and other projects in real time. Just place the light sources and a few furniture models to see your project render in real time. By now, I will keep up testing Octane to write a review, stay tuned!
Managed to get this working with my Nvidia 8800GTX. It’s maybe not got as many ‘cuda cores’ as some of the newer models but it works really well as a tech example. A little rough around the edges of course, but the principle is mind blowingly cool and I’m gonna follow all these GPU renderers closely!
NOTE: Nvidia’s latest WHQL certified drivers all have OpenCL capability built in now. Still to test them out but that’s OpenCL support on Nvidia’s out in the open!