Hi Adrien,
Thanks for taking an interest in Arnold for your bachelor thesis. I often hear people ask the question of GPU vs CPU, to which my opinion is that its less of a competition of which hardware is better but more of a utilization of resources that we haven't used before. In a age where the assets are getting ever more complex we are in a constant battle to keep render times down. Therefore, having a massively parallel piece of hardware in your machine sit idle when you could be using it to shave time off your render seems incredible wasteful. If there was an effective way to use your CD-ROM drive to speed up renders, I bet we probably would do.
This being said, I think a more interesting question is to ask is how renderers are evolving to become more interactive to provide faster previews such that artists can iterate quickly on their lookdev. Gone are the days when you would simply feed a renderer a scene and have to wait until the final render finishes to see your result. Its now all about getting feedback to the user about their render as quickly as possible and seeing the render progress so that they can review and make decisions on their work as early as possible.
For the sake of argument, here are just a few pro's off the top of my head for GPU rendering to spark some ideas.
- GPU's are massively parallel pieces of hardware which fit well at solving an embarrassingly parallel task such as ray tracing
- Nvidia GPUs have dedicated hardware to tackle this problem that gives great speed ups!
- Its easier to scale GPU's than CPU's. You can easily stick more GPU's into your computer unlike CPU's where you would need to upgrade to multi-socket machines
- GPU's have a higher compute than a CPU for their power consumption. So in theory, you should be able to do more work without hurting your electricity bill. This is something that you need to think about with render farms and such.
I hope these thoughts were of some aid to you and good luck with the thesis!
Cheers,
Dec
