One slight (symantics, mostly) correction... there IS an optoin to 'Enable OpenGL' for the final render. And if you enable that, it DOES use the hardware for rendering, but you get the exact same render as you do in the editor window, so it's really only useful for things like seeing what your final cropping is going to be (if say you render a 400x800 image when you're working in a 800x800 workspace, the sides will be cropped and the image centered, so you could get a quick idea of how it's going to be cropped).

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