Overview of Materials in Cycles - Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures - page 3

A GPU-based rendering has the advantage of literally increasing the Cycles' render-
ing speed several times, albeit with the disadvantage of a small memory limit, so that
it's not always possible to render big complex scenes made by a lot of geometry; in
such cases, it's better to use the CPU instead.
There are other ways to reduce the rendering times and also to reduce or avoid the
noise and the fireflies (white dots) produced in several cases by the glossy, trans-
parent, and light-emitting materials. All of this doesn't strictly belong to shaders or
materials, by the way, you can find more information related to these topics at the
following addresses:
• Cycles Render Engine: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/
Render/Cycles
• Reducing Noise - Cycles Wiki page: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/
Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Reducing_Noise .
• A list of supported graphic cards for Cycles can be found at: ht-
tps://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus .