Why are games rendered with a GPU while Blender, Cinebench and other programs use the CPU to render high quality 3d imagery? Why do some start rendering in the center and go outwards (e.g. Cinebench, Blender) and others first make a crappy image and then refine it (vRay Benchmark)?

Question

Why are games rendered with a GPU while Blender, Cinebench and other programs use the CPU to render high quality 3d imagery? Why do some start rendering in the center and go outwards (e.g. Cinebench, Blender) and others first make a crappy image and then refine it (vRay Benchmark)?

In: Technology

Answer 1

There are technical reasons as others have mentioned, but I can’t help but think that it is at least partly because programming on the GPU is much more of a pain than a CPU. Even getting GPU drivers on Linux that perform well is an exercise in frustration.

The tooling for GPU programming is much worse than the plethora of debuggers, profilers, etc. available for traditional programming.