I'm not geared for GPU rendering on either Octane or Lux. :blushing:  All of my desktops have nVidia cards, which leaves Lux out.  Lux wants OpenCL (think AMD/ATI/Radeon), and nVidia throttles their cards' OpenCL .  Octane wants nVidia's CUDA, but my cards are too old to have much CUDA capacity or they are nVidia Quadros, which aren't designed for parallel-processing speed.

     GPU rendering in Lux is a nice option to have, but not a panacea.  Citing the Reality User Guide:

"LuxRender can use the GPU to accelerate some rendering operations. While this is a great feature, it’s important to understand that there are limitations to what it can do and that the quality of the render might not be the same as what can be obtained with the standard, CPU-based, renderer.

Pure GPU ... mode is not as physically accurate as the standard LuxRender rendering but it provides the fastest response. With pure GPU acceleration the GPU is used for storing the geometric data and the textures."

     So a GPU render does not equal a CPU render, and using GPU limits the textures and geometry to the memory limits of your weakest video card.  By the way, Reality recognizes at most three GPU.  Your computer's power supply would need to be big to feed 3 GPU plus the rest of the computer.

     I don't mean to dissuade anyone from using GPU rendering.  GPU is much faster, and the results are generally going to be plenty good enough.  But some render engines only run CPU (Firefly, Vue, et al).

     I myself may some day build a GPU rig;  if so, I'll get a huge power supply (or dual power supplies), get three GPU with as much VRAM onboard as possible, and use water jacketing with an external radiator/fan array to cool them.  If I ever do, I'll probably go with nVidia cards and the Octane renderer.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5