Rendering Processors: AR350 vs AMD vs P4?

landrau asks: "I'm planning on building a render farm and was wondering whether anyone would know the pros and cons of the AR350 processor, used in The Renderdrive, as opposed to building a renderfarm with an AMD or P4 processor." While the Renderdrive looks like a real rendering workhorse that can produce some gorgeous results (see images in page header), does it justify its lofty pricetag of £6950 (over $12,300USD)?

Comments

Included renderer?

[BrynM]

From my perusal of their site, it would seem to me that one of the main advantages is having a standard and fully featured renderer come with the boxes. The renderer acts like a plugin for both Max and Maya (look in the download section) and can do caustics, reflections/refraction, radiosity and such. Having that stuff out of the box is so much better than pounding out a Renderman install. And the render queue is native via a plugin to boot! This may be one of the easier solutions for setup I've seen yet if all they claim is true.

Be sure to count the price of your rendering software into your comparrison. The price of Renderman and it's associated support could well make up the difference in your hardware costs. Don't forget to include the price of your install time (man-hours) as well.

Re:AR350

[GoRK]

A logic argument --

If they are getting that kind of speed out of an FPGA, they would be a bunch of complete stupid idiots not to develop it on into silicon. The speed advantage alone would probably put them on top of the market instantly. Heck, they could probably even offer realtime rendering at broadcast tv resolutions. Also keep in mind that FPGA's with enough gates to actually do this kind of thing cost a heck of a lot more than 12K.

Not that this kind of thing isn't coming.. I would assume that realtime raycasting is going to be the 'next big thing' in consumer graphics -- We'll probably be seeing that kind of power in the next 15 years easily...