OctaneRender is an unbiased rendering application featuring real-time processing based only on the GPU (graphics processing unit). OctaneRender was originally developed by a New Zealand company called Refractive Software and the development of the renderer was later taken over by OTOY. OctaneRender is the first GPU based unbiased renderer released to the public. It uses the graphics card to calculate all measures of light, reflection and refraction. It runs only on NVidia’s GPUs and takes advantage of the CUDA technology and it’s incompatible with other video cards by other vendors. Is a true GPU based engine, not a hybrid CPU/GPU, nor a CPU based engine that was modified with GPU acceleration. Since a CPU adds a negligible speedup to the total rendering speed, having your CPU free for other tasks while rendering with OctaneRender allows you to use your system for other tasks while rendering.

AAA Studio has released FurryBall 3.2, the latest update to its GPU-based render engine, and announced that it is working on a version of the previously Maya-only renderer for 3ds Max.

Actually is FurryBall is the first unique real-time GPU renderer in production quality implemented directly into Maya. You can see your render in real-time hairs, Maya Fluids, with bump-maps, textures, soft shadows, reflections and refractions, ambient occlusion and color bleeding, depth of field and many other features directly in Maya viewport. FurryBall is about 30-300x TIMES faster than CPU renderers on a regular Graphics card. 

Indigo 3.4 brings several major new features to the visualisation professional's toolkit, including the ability to render with section planes and orthographic cameras. Performance and convergence speed is greatly improved, IES support has been overhauled, and a brand new native plugin for 3ds Max is included in this high-powered update.

Indigo Renderer 3.4 is available now for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The renderer is compatible with 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, Revit, SketchUp and Softimage.

V-Ray has been a popular third-party rendering solution already for more than 10 years and his history reach back to 2002 when the first release of V-Ray was released by Chaos Group. From that time V-Ray became a rendering solution of choice for many 3D production companies due to its capability to deliver high quality photorealistic images in short time. V-Ray is mostly connected to the field of architectural visualization but also to VFX. Back in 2011 was released V-Ray 2.0, a new major release which brought a lot of improvements and features transforming the render engine into a complete rendering solution. Combining the power of V-Ray render engine with the flexibility and speed of the interactive rendering system V-Ray RT GPU makes from V-Ray 2.0 a unique product on the market.