I was invited to give a presentation at NVIDIA's GTC event last March in Silicon Valley. At Floorplanner we use NVIDIA hard- and software to render 3D images of floor plans and interiors. My talk was about the journey we've made over the years regarding our 3D rendering and they just released the recorded video.
Our first render attempts were pretty poor. We used low quality 3D furniture models in combination with CPU rendering, which took ages to render an image. The acquisition of MyDeco gave us a lot of high quality 3D furniture models and NVIDIA's Iray renderer (wrapped in an easy to use web service called RealityServer by Migenius). This took the quality of our 3D images to a whole new level!
Next to improving the quality of our renders we had to find a way to scale our system. We render almost a million 3D images a month which means it has to be fast. We started out by building our own GPU render machines, but that was risky business to due power and internet outages at our office. After co-locating our own GPU servers we are now mainly rendering mainly in the cloud on demand.
NVIDIA is doing much more than rendering these days. Have a look at Jensen Huang's keynote presentation to see all the amazing stuff they are up to!