iray officially in the open with Bunkspeed Shot

Bunkspeed Shot (final version) was officially released last week. More importantly, it also means that the long awaited iray, which is powering SHOT, is finally available for everyone (it should have been here much earlier with 3ds max 2011, but was not integrated for some obscure reason).

Bunkspeed SHOT press release

You can download a 30-day trial demo at http://bunkspeed.com/shot/demo/index.html (Don't bother if you don't have a CUDA enabled card with at least 1GB of VRAM, else the software defaults to CPU only, totally retarded limitation if you ask me).

Funny enough, the press release makes it look like you'll need a Quadro or Tesla to run the software, but a Geforce should do fine and is probably faster. The amount of GPU memory will be the real decisive factor and Octane has shown that you can do a lot within a 1GB VRAM budget (it even has procedural textures now, which take up almost no memory).

Waiting for V-Ray GPU... hopefully another "Siggraph surprise" :-D