Sunday 25 December 2011

Ghost in the Church

For Christmas, I received a new graphics card.  NVIDIA GeForce GTX508,  with 3Gb RAM and 512 CUDA cores!  Blender can offload the rendering to the GPU.  A test render that took over 9 minutes using my Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, takes only 51 seconds on the new GPU.  This makes an amazing difference with real-time feedback when tweaking textures.

Here is a test scene that I was not able to make look good using CPU only rendering,  I couldn't get the ghost texture right using trial and error and having to wait for feedback.


And another super-fast render.  This time of a midge, I previously gave up tweaking the textures on this one as it took several minutes to see the effect of any changes.  Not now :)