Dassault acquisition.

There have been a number of wrong turns and missteps that have got us to this rather undesirable position going back to about 2006. Each time a poorly explored decision has been followed by another until no-one is quite sure where we are, how we got here or how to rejoin a sensible path. It does require someone to actually admit they are misdirected first.  IMO Monica is someone who has well exceeded her competence level and this can only happen when others with even more responsibility have also lost the plot and allow themselves to be usurped. As someone trained as a lawyer she may boldly represent engineering as she interprets it however she is not an engineer herself. There is a difference between being articulate and confident in a mild vacuum and knowing what you are doing and making appropriate choices for a given set of circumstances. Her fleetfooted stepping stone career through various marketing agencies seems to have allowed her to accumulate just enough knowledge and parle to be dangerous given enough space and opportunity. In the end much of which is being projected is an obvious nonsense to practical people of sound judgement. The role of the audience of customers here is to be the jury of discretion and common sense. If it was up to me Monica would be removed from undue influence before she does any more damage reflected in the share price. Unfortunately we are relying on a CEO to do that and thats a whole other story of someone getting much further than they ought with a different type of parle.

It is indeed very unfortunate to have to express such misgivings about certain individuals publicly but there is a lot at stake here. DS absolutely have to get their act together. I think it is important they are left in no doubt of the customers point of view at this time. 

It depends what sort of work you do.

I use Octane on 2xGTX780 for varied subjects not just stuff out of SW.

And yes this is kind of expensive to set up but I like the WYSIWYG camera navigation and the results of an unbiased render engine.

Some people are willing to invest a lot in GPU however. For instance some Octane users producing really excellent arch viz renders are using up to 8xTitans together.

To obtain the same rendering performance out of cpu would cost a lot more.

I quote you here one user.

>I've got 3 systems that work 24x7.

>1 X quad GTX580 3GB rig + 1 X quad GTX680 4GB rig + 1 X quad Titan 6GB rig

He is very very good at what he does though and he makes a good living from it.

GPU certainly can pay its way.

A cloud based gpu render service is another possibility. Rent capacity as you need, when you need.

If DS or SW force their users to acquire Quadros or Teslas for gpu rendering on their workstation then it becomes a little silly.

If those gpu can be put to use for engineering simulations then it make a little more sense but even so...

Geforce is about as far as you want to go for cost effectiveness, and they are faster.

Really I cant see why SW users would want to move on from Modo at this stage whatever the render flavour of the month is or whats laying around in the spare parts bin.

Modo has useful modelling applications for ID users as well as the rendering aspect.

Not that we necessarily get a say in the matter or the choices made are the best ones.

Whether the next one is iray or bunkspeed there are other things than rendering/appearances makeovers that could be better attended to inside SW IMO.

If Modo isnt part of the bigger game it might well disappear fairly rapidly from the SW sphere like Tsplines did.

Sure, well we cant do that because these forums are for discussing SW matters.

Did you want to say anything about the DS aquistion instead?