Werner Ziemerink
I must be the only person earth that do not like Redshift. The speed is great, but I am not sold on the quality.
There is definitely a “look” issue that I believe the RS team is aware of themselves (and have publicly acknowledged to some degree).
At the moment, the closest equivalent to CPU images that GPU renderers seem to be able to achieve is probably Octane who for some reason has gotten really maligned, perhaps unfairly so.
Is this all because of the biased vs. unbiased? I don't think so, although that's probably part of it. I feel the big elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is that GPU rendering requires workarounds and cheats that are inherent with the technology and which, at least for the time being, are simply not on par with the CPU equivalents. A good case-in-point is the overly-hyped RT ray-tracing that Nvidia RTX GPU's promise. Many people bought into it as providing the equivalent of CPU renders, except in real-time. The truth is that it doesn't, it relies on an extremely low sample count to extrapolate visual information that normally requires a lot more rays being cast. GPU rendering of course is different than RT, and considerably more refined, but still heavily reliant on workarounds in order to achieve what it does.
Ultimately what is production-acceptable or isn't depends on the needs of the production. I have seen extremely believable work done in RT engines, and I have seen extremely crappy and unrealistic renders done with Arnold. I think a lot depends on who is driving!
Here's one of the most impressive examples done with RT tech that I have seen, in this case EEVEE:
https://youtu.be/qG31WSioSxk [youtu.be]
But…Ian is a big fan of texture projection, and I suspect that he's using that technique extensively in this video. I doubt that something like this would work when a massive amount of polygons are needed.