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

3. In the Properties panel to the right of the screen, go to the Render window and,

under the Render tab, it's now possible to configure the GPU of the graphics card
instead of the default CPU (this is possible only if your graphic card supports CUDA,
that is, for NVIDIA graphic cards. OpenCL, which is intended to support rendering on
AMD/ATI graphics cards, is still in a very incomplete and experimental stage, and
therefore, not very usable yet).

A GPU-based rendering has the advantage of literally increasing the Cycles' rendering speed
several times, albeit with the disadvantage of a small memory limit, so it's not always
possible to render big complex scenes made up of 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, transparent, 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:

Information on Cycles Render Engine can be found at http://wiki.blender.org/
index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles .

More information on Reducing Noise is available on the Cycles wiki page, at 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 https://developer.nvidia.
com/cuda-gpus .

Material nodes in Cycles

A Cycles material is basically made up of distinct components named shaders. They can be
combined to build even more complex surface or volume shaders.

In this recipe, we'll have a look at the basic, necessary steps required to build a basic surface
Cycles material, to activate the rendered preview in the 3D window, and to finally render a
simple scene.