Desktops

When working with CAD-software, need a lot of rendering (ray-trace animations) and extensively use photo-editors, 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; consult your software-supplier for more information.

Interesting is to get the hardware upgraded. On Apple-computers unluckily the support for the stream-processors is lacking; we 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 it 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 the creativity happens in the head when drinking a 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 know the stories of Pixar-movies which 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.