Blender Cycles Renderer Testdrive

While comparing VRay RT, iray and Cycles I thought about showing a little video on the integration of Cycles in Blender. After waiting a couple of months I decided to give the Cycles renderer for Blender a shot again. Since I've built a new computer it was a nobrainer to give it a shot and see GPU rendering integrated in Blender.
It is amazing what is going on with Blender development these days, see yourself...

iray compared to mental ray first impressions

I built a new computer a few days ago with a Nvidia GTX 590 graphic card to compare 3DS Max 2012 rendering speed and quality between VRay, VRay RT, mental ray and iray.

GTX 590 Speed, Memory and Temperature

The GTX 590 has got 2 GTX 580 GPU's on a single slot card with 2x512 CUDA processing units. Yes that is more than the higher end cards (Quadro, Tesla...) have onboard. For the money I spend on this gamercard I can buy 2 or three if they get toasted while heavily rendering. I get more bang for the buck than the high end cards. With careful cooling and maybe adjusting the clock speed I can squeeze all out that I need.