who said hardware rendering was fast?
 

lol who said hardware render was fast?
same scene angle etc
hardware
Total Time For Render (hh:mm:ss): 00:02:37

software
Time For Tessellation (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:02
Time For Shadow Map (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:03
Time For Post Process (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00
Time For Frame Render (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:26


Maybe i need one of those quadrofx3000?

(hey i got 30fps in wievports...dunno why it took 2 min to render 1frame)

do you want to post the file. Maybe we can all do render tests to see the results. I have a quadro FX 700 and a quadro FX 2000.
It should not take very long to do hardware renders, but it may depend on what your scene looks like.

Isnt the quality you get out of hardware rendering so much worse than software?

well, quality will depend on what you need. Hardware is still not at par with software rendering but it will eventually get there and will probably be the choice for most people.

you can currently get some very great renders from hardware.
I will post side by side renders of software and hardware.

hardware currently supports the following.

Polygons and NURBS geometry
Multiple textured channels
Advanced transparency
Hardware particles
Instancing
Point, Directional, Spot, and Ambient Light types
Any number of lights
Light linking
Per-vertex and per-pixel shading effects
Multi-pass and multi-sampling anti-aliasing
File textures for any supported channel
On-the-fly procedural and shading network conversions
Specular highlights
Bumps
Reflections
Shadows
Motion blur
RBG color, alpha matte (mask), and Z depth output
Command line rendering
Render diagnostics. Warnings for unsupported primitives, shaders, and light types and light features are provided.

I's like to be part of this too! :)

hey guys, Here is to quick renders I did. Not much involved.

I will try this same render with bumps to see the speed hit. There may be a glitch on Quadro FX 700 that messes up bumos for some odd reason. will try the FX 2000.

I think it's because hardware rendering struggles on shadows and you've got quite a few try rendering without any shadow and see what times you get.

Edit
Forget that
I thought the image above was the one by dragonfx. woops

I'd try it with particles, but apart from some fluid sims, particles are divided anyway by renderer. (i.e. HW or SW)

So certain things can be only done in one or the other... sadly not both without instancing:(

i cant post it as the file istn actually mine and righ now i dont have permission but it is game content meant... 50000aprox tri polys + colormaps + alpha no bumps
works fine on wievports... not if you hit maya hardware render... strange

I also find the hardware tends to struggle when you start adding shadows and file textures.