Lewis Taylor

7950x hands down. It is the best bang for the buck chip out there. You are also future proofing at the
newer chips will use the same socket.

L

mandrake0
USD is the native Scene file format for the Karma or Renderman Renderer. The question is will Redshift, Arnold, Octane, Vray.... change there native format to USD or not. I would say in the long run the current old Rendering process will go away just because no Renderengine Company will invest to update all there custom plugins for each DCC Software when they can have just one Plugin for all.

every layer of functionality gives more options but also more complexity. it is never easy to change the pipeline but in the long run it will be beneficial.

USD is the native format only for Karma, in terms of Scene Description and geometric format.
It is not the native format of Renderman. Renderman is using Hydra delegate to translate USD stage into
it's scene description, and translating the geometry also into the native geo renderman can eat.
It has no USD procedural with direct translation either.

No other engine apart from Karma will be a fully native one in both scene description and geometry format.
You will get more of them supplying a procedural, so you can bypass the need to use hydra to do the translating.


L

It's always done that. N is special, because N on points will end up interpolated in N on vertices by the renderer.
It cannot exist in 2 places. If you loaded H9 up and tried it you'd see the same thing.