Just a few comments.

I think your $549 price tag is a bit, shall we say .... ambitious?  Carrara is still at the $285 sale price for the "general public" (at this point that looks like a long term sale price). Of course anyone who knows about DAZ will get a PC membership and pay the PC club price, which is $171 right now.

There are also a couple of things to consider when comparing render engines/technologies and the type of processing used. First, Octane is an unbiased render engine. in order to get as close to as possible to equivalent comparison between Octane and Embree, you will need to use a renderer that is running in a fully unbiased mode. Only then will you be even close to apples to apples comparisons, otherwise your comparing apples to elephants. Once you compare the performance of Embree in fully unbiased rendering mode to Octane you will quickly realize that there is no way that CPU rendering speeds can compare to GPU rendering speeds.

How can I make such a bold statement (and be 100% confident that I am correct)? Easy, it's simply the math and physics. Let’s do two ultra-simplified hypothetical scenarios, one for CPU processing, and one for GPU processing, to illustrate the differences in the raw computing capacity between CPU and GPU processing. Keep in mind that Embree simply optimizes the processing of instructions and computations for the render, it can’t make the CPU run any faster.

First, let’s use a CPU rendering powerhouse with dual Intel i7-3930 Hex-core processors running at 3.8GHz, which gives you 24 logical processing cores with a theoretical capacity of processing 3,800,000,000 instructions/computations per second per core, or a total theoretic capacity of 91,200,000,000 instructions per second. That’s a really impressive number, and FAST.

Now, let’s use a GPU rendering powerhouse, dual Nvidia GTX Titans with 2,688 cuda cores each running at 837Mhz. This gives us a theoretic capacity of 2,249,856,000,000 instructions/computations per second per card, or a total of 4,499,712,000,000 instructions/computations per second, or 49.7 times more instructions/computations per second compared to the CPU rendering power house. True, this is using an ultra-simplified theoretic computation capacity scenario, but it provides a good basic comparison. In the real world, things aren’t even close to this simple, and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of other factors that would feed into a good comparison. However, this lays some basic ground work for why at this point, unless you have a beast of a multiprocessor machine at your disposal (or a render farm), CPU rendering can’t compete with GPU rendering when using the same rendering algorithms (i.e. unbiased rendering) with the same geometry and shaders in the scene.

Of course, using biased rendering in CPU based render engines definitely levels the playing field quite a bit. It’s often difficult, if not impossible to visually tell the difference between a high quality biased render compared to the same image created with an unbiased renderer (Maxwell comes to mind). But, as you crank up the “quality” of a biased renderer, render times increase and come closer to those of an unbiased render engine. So it all comes back to personal preference.

It will be interesting to read your comparison of Embree and Octane, though I do wonder where/how you will get the data for comparison. Honestly, in order to make a true comparison and derive any sort of cost analysis you really need to do testing under equivalent conditions, with a targeted outcome. Reading forum posts, marketing material, and trying to extrapolate any true meaningful scientific or engineering data from it is close to impossible.

I would hope that you will include some form of real benchmarks in your comparisons of all the different rendering software you mentioned, including the work associated with using/exporting Carrara scenes to them. Also, providing sample renders is really helpful as well. I would also hope that you would include additional factors that might address things like enhanced or convoluted workflows. As an example of why this is important, few people use only one application. If you use DS and Carrara, if plugins are available for both you can easily go between the two, using the strengths of each, and have the same shaders, lights, and render engine in each, rather than trying to work with two different sets of shaders, lights, and renderers

Also, you need to keep in mind that the Octane plugin for Carrara is in development now, and will be available soon, regardless what DAZ does with the internal renderer in Carrara. Plugins to other render engines mentioned, and the integration of Embree into Carrara, at this point are only a wish and a prayer.

I would also like to stongly urge that if you, or anyone else reading this forum, really wants Embree in Carrara, you need to communicate your desires directly to DAZ3D. The notion that if they don’t read these forums simply indicates that they don’t care about Carrara is pretty short sighted. You say you want DAZ to focus their time, efforts, and $$$ on improving and fixing Carrara. Then you say that if they aren’t spending time, efforts, and $$$ reading forum posts all over the internet, they just don’t care. Seriously??????

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