Quote - With only one difference: Embree would have turned Carrara into a world-class product worth buying...

 To whom?  Not to underplay the Embree technology, or it's importance to Intel's processors in rendering, but I doubt it would be that big of a game-changer in the overall world of render engines for Carrara.  GPU technology is faster, and more exciting overall, although Embree helps bring CPU up to par.

Would it really make Carrara a "world class" product all by itself, and appeal to a market looking for world-class rendering technology, which are usually professionals or studios?  Nah.  The current king of world-class raytrace rendering, Vray, has a helper to it's 3dsmax (and possibly others) plugin that uses Embree too, and benefits from it as well.  Vray is currently the "production-proven" rendering standard for raytrace engines, but it's not because of Embree at all.  It was that way long before Embree was introduced.  I think a lot more would need to be done in addition to Embree in order to bring Carrara into the modern world of render technology.  I agree, however, that it would be a good start.  A better start might be to have that in it's default render engine, but also include support for plugin render engines, like Vray.  Plugin render support is essencial these days to most 3D packages.  People want to have a choice, and want the best tool for the job.  Even Blender has multiple engines to choose from.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.