Graphicspeak has a great Success Story from Jeff Patton, freelance CG artist known for his mechanical imagery for some big names.  Discussing a recent project for Mercedes Benz, he took his hour per frame renders in 3dsMax and converted them to iRay, and found renders completing in mere minues.

Patton said, “After I finished my first full Mercedes Benz project with the new Nvidia setup, I was stunned. Rendering out the images at 6K in the past took me about an hour per image using the CPU. With Iray and Quadro, I was able to knock that down to eight minutes — EIGHT minutes! It’s a huge benefit to be able to turn things around that much faster.”

The workstation he used had an Nvidia Quadro 6000 and a Tesla C2070 GPU, both fairly high-end cards.  Quadro 6000‘s run around $4,000, and a Tesla C2070 runs around $2,500.  That same $6,500 could have bought 3 of the BOXX renderPro systems.  With a linear improvement in rendertimes, he could have gone from 1 frame an hour to 4 frames an hour, against 7 frames an hour with the iRay solution.  Sounds like a win for iRay & CUDA to me.

via GraphicSpeak » Nvidia Iray and GPUs supercharge Mercedes Benz visualizations.