Crystal Man Project

This is where things can get really wild there's values that defines how the refractive index works for your object in 3d. Its about defining how something as simple how water can refract light essentially. So we have to define to our render engine with Octane how these materials should be rendered with the environment. I am also using and older version of Octane renderer because they have there plugin setup so that you have to use the plugin that matches the age of your hardware which makes it so that you can't use complex even higher complex rendering techniques than what your GPU can handle so with me using a GTX 980 currently I can't use the latest version of Octane this version I am running is compatible up to the GTX 1080 TI. If I installed a GTX 2080 then the software of Octane wont work.

 

For most design programs I have seen this to be a trend, if you don't have the compatible hardware that it was designed for it just wont run in the first place. Some of how that is, I believe is baked into the companies who design these programs and software have made it so that you will have to go out and buy new hardware every so often just to be able to run the new software thats been released. I have seen this first hand with Video Editing software where you will define and tell the software to use GPU Acceleration and the software will choose to fall back on CPU instructions to operate which is much slower compared to running everything on GPU Acceleration.

One of the biggest things that GPU's are great at are parallel instructions and also scale linearly. A simple example of scaling linearly is having 4 GPU's in your system compared to only having 1 GPU in your system. In modern times with Nvidia they have over time reduced the use of SLI and NV-Link for there GPU's. NV-Link was really cool cause it was a higher bandwidth link that allowed the VRAM of the GPU's in your system to take 2 GPU's with 16gb's of VRAM to increase it to 32gb's of VRAM which was really cool. then shortly later the 3080 dropped the NV-Link connecter and the NV-Link could only be found on the 3090. Then with the newest 4090 GPU's from Nvidia NV-Link is now completely dead. You can still add multi-GPU's to your system but you wont find modern Intel motherboards with more than one 16x PCI-E slot now.

If you want true PCI-E lanes the only last resort is from AMD with there Threadripper series. Modern Intel no longer wants to spend time on the top 2% of users who want to run and add multi GPU's to there system they have completely exited the prosumer market for the past 6 years+ Intel's last Pro products was the X99 Chipsets that you could have 128gb's of memory and 8-channel memory. There X299 series was just a direct copy of there server grade Xeon Hardware retro fitted for competing with AMD's response to releasing Threadripper and ultimately intel fell flat on there face and had gotten to comfy being king of the CPU market for too long and getting stagnate with there products. So for me and what I do with graphic design I am stuck with continuing to run with 6 year old hardware that just works.

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Apple has also made there users subject to this as well with there Ecosystem with there top pro users. I have seen and worked on DJ's computers who are still using old G5 Pro Towers that they spend $6,000 along with all there custom software and hardware tools that interact seamlessly. When they first came out 10 years ago they where meant to last. So the same thing is true for the newer things that are released as well. The new Mac Studio seems cool but all the old hardware and software those DJ's use to run there studio is all rendered useless pretty much. For most people it could mean over $20,000+ to upgrade everything, if your any person who hates change it also comes with the downfall is that there's things that aren't fully optimized from first release.

 

So on top of buying new hardware there's also the time cost for the tools that your used to using sometimes not being ready for prime time. Which then makes you frustrated when things don't work correctly from first use, then jumping back to your old hardware and tools that just works in the first place.