Arion Real Time Renderer Enters the Fray at V1.6

Real time renderers and renderers in general are all the rage. I think it's funny that so many companies are battling for the #1 slot if the "realest of the real" contest. Look I can't tell whats real anymore. Can you? Still they try and somehow succeed to add some new reality to our images that was heretofore unheard of. Real time in general sends a chill up my spine. It's almost uncanny that these images are more real than real. I think it's fitting that Arion from Random Control calls itself "real-time digital photography". Other than CG artists, the photographer suffers over the tiniest detail to make things "just right". Here is a little about Arion

What is Arion?

Arion is the hybrid-accelerated and physically-based light simulator developed by RandomControl. It inherits all our expertise in light simulation and makes it run on steroids, thanks to our very unique approach to massive CPU+GPU+LAN computation.

Arion is:

• an interactive WYSIWYG editing application.
• a super-high performance production renderer.

Arion's unique approach

Arion uses all the GPUs -and- all the CPUs in your system simultaneously, not wasting a single flop available. Additionally, Arion can use all the GPUs and all the CPUs in all the other computers in your network forming a cluster for massive computation.

In that regard, Arion is a grid-computing solution to the problem of light physics simulation. Simultaneous GPU+CPU+LAN, combined with our exhaustively optimized code, is what we call hybrid acceleration.

Some facts about Arion

• Uses all the GPUs -and- CPUs in your system simultaneously.
• Plugging an extra GPU delivers an immediate performance boost.
• 20x to 100x speed up per machine (hardware-dependent).
• Strictly physically-based.
• Fully unbiased (no cheats, no shortcuts).
• Does not need any kind of precomputations.
• Easy-to-use interactive WYSIWYG editing app.
• The real-time viewport -is- final quality.
• Production render engine features (commandline renderer, compositing channels, etc...)
• Compatible with NetWarrior for hyper-fast cooperative still frame and animation rendering.

Really? Are you kidding with me? I guess not.

http://www.randomcontrol.com/arion-gallery-miscellaneous