| The most tedious section of any 3D modeling program is rendering, it can take minutes, hours, or even whole days, it is a very intense work for the CPU, but ... what if the GPU took care of this? |
Cycles is a new rendering engine that is being developed for Blender, it will be an evolution of the current engine, and you can take advantage of the GPU to perform calculations 10 to 50 times faster, or even more, with the use of video cards in parallel.
Cycles, for now, relies on the NVIDIA CUDA platform to render the renderings, although in the future it is planned to also implement OpenCL to support ATI cards.
Today it is possible to test a Blender compilation with this new engine to test it, it still has a long way to go to be finished, but it is enough to give us an idea of what it will be in the future.
NVIDIA cards are supported from the Geforce 8xxx and 9xxx series, although its use with the most recent GTX 2xx, GTX 4xx or GTX 5xx is recommended, since they are the ones that truly show an increase in speed, older cards could have a even lower performance just using the CPU.
Installation
Just unzip the .7z package and run the blender executable.
Source: blender.org