Are there stable and production-quality renderers out there, which use the GPU?
(I mean pluggable renderes for suits such as 3ds max, Maya, Blender, ...)
I am aware that preview functionality often uses the GPU, but I was hoping to accelerate the final (real) rendering.
Not yet. They are two different kind of technologies. I am afraid we. Are still stuck with big expensive render farms for a while.
UPDATE:
Sorry, found out that only the preview-renderer is GPU-accelerated :(
I found out that V-Ray 2.0 claims to support this. It is for 3ds max and Maya.
I have not tried it and I don't know to which extend it is "faster" thanks to GPU rendering, and if it's renderings are reproducible among different GPUs (which is an important criteria for final production rendering).
I hope to get this information somewhere soon.
iRay is GPU-accelerated and is quite photorealistic, especially when using the iray plugin: http://blog.irayrender.com/post/83815598089/iray-material-plugin-updated-for-3dsmax-2015
