Arion Alternatives

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 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.

Arion is fully compatible with the file formats used by fryrender (.fry and .rcs). Thus, Arion and fryrender share and use the exact same plugins.

Additionally, Arion can open/save scenes in the widely supported .OBJ format. So you can use Arion from virtually every modelling app in the market.

Arion supports all nVidia CUDA-enabled products (GeForce, Tesla and Quadro). There are no immediate plans to support other hardware APIs as of this moment.