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
This is something I actually have quite a bit of experience with and I disagree with a lot of answers. Normally, you want to let the CPU do all the graphics unless you absolutely require GPU acceleration because the CPU can’t keep up. When working with a GPU, you have to convert your textures, matrices, and vectors into a format that the GPU can work with before it can access that data. The CPU has access to everything loaded into memory already so very little prep work is required before painting into your screen when using the CPU.
I have no idea why people thing GPU = inaccurate math. It’s all up to the programmer and how they code the program to work. I can select lower resolution textures and different scaling methods (fast vs high quality) regardless of what method I’m using to actually render the scene.
As far as what order things get rendered visually, that’s up to the programmer too. I’ll only start painting lower quality / partially complete renderings if the user needs some kind of feedback that things are working as intended before the full rendering has finished. You can pick and choose what gets rendered first and the selections are based on what the product and engineering teams have determined are the most important for the end user.
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