Pure Rendering Card

The PURE rendering card is a hardware raytracing solution capable of producing stunning images, and at speeds which certainly make it commercially viable. Using a RenderMan-compliant rendering engine to generate scenes, the card comes configured for three major apps – 3ds max, Maya and Viz – and is thus tailor-made for environments where shiny, refracted and reflected environments are commonplace; in practice, that means product or architectural visualisation.

Surprisingly, given its size, the card fits in a standard PCI slot and requires no extra power to run its eight dedicated processors. Physical installation is therefore relatively painless. We found installing the software slightly more problematic, though – thankfully, an alternative installation method worked without a hitch.

A major qualifier of the effectiveness of the PURE card is the strength of the host system. The card’s processing power means it needs plenty of RAM and fast processors to feed it with enough data to keep the chips working at full capacity. Anything less that 512MB of RAM will seriously affect performance, which rather defeats the object of having the card in the first place.

While the PURE card itself has just come down in price from £2936 to £2231, remember that for an annual software subscription cost of £250, you also get access to, among other things, a library of RenderMan shaders and assistance in developing custom shaders.

The world which a PURE card produces looks beautifully crisp and free of imperfection; in fact, just the type of world you’d want your fabulous new products to inhabit. If you’re looking for a way to speed up your rendering process without dropping below the raytraced standard, then ART VPS’s PURE card is certainly an attractive proposition. For regular animators and modellers, however, the argument to upgrade is considerably less compelling.