MachStudio Pro ships - $5k gets you software & FireGL V8650 - Say goodbye to render farms

StudioGPU announced that MachStudio Pro is now shipping for Windows XP and Vista.  MSRP is $4,999 and that includes an AMD ATI FireGL V8650 3D workstation graphics accelerator card (2 GB framebuffer).  Here’s the short take home summary: MachStudio Pro harnesses multi-threaded GPU computing so that lighitng and render times can be dramatically reduced from hours to minutes and minutes to seconds or sub-seconds. Comparable final scenes are consistently rendered with MachStudio Pro at rates of 500 to 900 times faster than traditional rendering packages.

I’ve written about MachStudio Pro previously because it really takes advantage of the the FireGL/FirePro GPUs for real-time, non-linear 3D workflows (AMD has a winner on their hands here). But now a few reviews have started to appear that corroborate my first impressions.  This software is game changing.  Here’s a few of the latest:

MachStudio Pro is a jewel in the GPGPU crown
Bright Side of News
“3D artists prepare to be amazed - StudioGPU released MachStudio Pro. If you thought that Modo was pretty rad, you haven’ seen anything yet.”

MachStudio Pro democratizes content creation
studiodaily blogs
“MachStudio Pro isn’t simply about a dramatic speed-up in rendering time: it’s about subverting the production-line assembly of CG images, in which each task–lighting, texturing, cameras–is an island. Instead, MachStudio Pro aims for a nonlinear pipeline in which any aspect of the image can be tweaked at any point in the creation process.”

StudioGPU replaces computer animation render farms with $5,000 PC
VentureBeat
“I’ve seen the demo with my own unbelieving eyes. A single graphics accelerator card on a standard Intel-powered PC can now render in seconds what used to take a roomful of servers all day.”