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Blender Adds Raytracing
rastachops writes "Blender, the Open Source 3D modelling tool has recently added Raytracing to its extensive list of features. 'Believe it or not, but Ton has integrated the raytracer from Blender's predecessor, Traces into Blender. He said "the algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that's forty times faster than in the early 1990's and raytracing is almost usable". For a comparison checkout the before and after screenshots.'"
What an odd comment. Even in the relatively early days (I personally started with rev 1.76) Blender has always rendered faster under Linux than Windows. Editing performance was a bit of a problem, since most gfx cards did not support Hardware acceleration under linux. (DRI was a fairly new addition to XFree86 at that time.) Blender is rather 3D graffics hardware intensive (are any 3D apps not?) as it was born under Irix on SGI boxes. However, things have changed. Two of the major vendors of high-end 3D gfx cards now have very good accelerated support either through their own driver (NVidia) or the DRI module (ATI). With the former, performance between Windows and Linux is nearly identical. For ATI users Linux performance can often be better, due to the fact that ATI's Windows drivers are much more painful to configure than DRl (you probably could get better performance from Window's drivers if you spent many many hours tweaking the ATI driver settings). Those two brands of card probably cover 95% of all serious 3D users. Blender is ment to be a proffessional application, not a toy. It has a way to go to be on par with Maya or LW, but even now, as an 80% ready application at 0% cost, it is an excelent tool for beginers, and even many professionals who don't regularly need many of the advanced (and expensive) features of the high end packages. I'll even risk being /.'s http://www.soylent-green.com to see some of my blender work. And I'm not even a power user.
Go ahead