There is a thread in this forum about the GPU based Octane and its outstanding performances (link).

Since I promised to stay out of that thread in order to not disrupt, I said I will start a new thread to talk about CPU based rendering solutions and their costs versus benefits when compared to Octane and other GPU based renderers.

I will start with Embree (link).

First please read through these two links: here and here.

One of them is from the Modo forums, the other from Lightwave's. Look at how positively they talk about Embree. None of them is actually even mentioning Octane or any other GPU based renderers as an alternative to embree or CPU based renderers.

These guys are professionals. Some of them could be working on multi-million dollars projects, some of them could be award-winning artists with the potential of making it to the cover of 3D World Magazine.

In this kind of business you're either quick or you're dead.

The fact that they don't mention Octane could mean one of 2 things: Either Octane is only marginally faster than CPU based renderers when you use it on actual scenes, not just carefully crafted demos, OR that the loss of quality resulting from reducing 2000x2000 hi-res textures into 256x256 super-low-res textures, possibly even leaving parts of your scene untextured, to make them fit in the GPU's RAM, takes such a toll on the render quality that the resulting picture or animation won't even make it into the ads of your local Penny-Saver or into the commercials of your neighborhood's burger-shop closed circuit TV.

True professionals don't seem to be impressed by Octane. Only hobbyists seem to think that Octane's gimmicky demos are eye-popping.

With this brief introduction, I will go into some cost versus benefits of CPU base renderers like Embree, Yafaray and 3Delight in my next posts.