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
GPU = quick and dirty.
CPU = slow but perfect and doesn’t need expensive hardware.
If you’re rendering graphics for a movie, it doesn’t matter if it takes an hour per frame, even. You just want it to look perfect. If you’re rendering a game where it has to be on-screen immediately, and re-rendered 60 times a second, then you’ll accept some blur, inaccuracy, low-res textures in the background, etc.
How the scene renders is entirely up to the software in question. Do they render it all in high quality immediately (which means you have to wait for each pixel to be drawn but once it’s drawn, it stays like that), or do they render a low-res version first, so you can get a rough idea of what the screen will look like, and then fill in the gaps in a second, third, fourth pass?
However, I bet you that Blender, etc. are using the GPU just as much, if not more. They’re just using it in a way that they aren’t trying to render 60fps. They’ll render far fewer frames, but in perfect quality (they often use things like compute shaders, for example, to do the computations on the GPU… and often at the same time as using the CPU).
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