While I was out at New Orleans last week, I ran into Bunkspeed and got a quick look at their forthcoming Hypershot tool. If you're into rendering and visualisation, you'll be aware that to generate truly photo-realistic imagery, in which every system you're using, takes a good deal of time - for both set-up and calculation. Hypershot flips this by providing a very minimum interface in which you load geometry, apply materials, load a HDRI scene, calculate a fully raytraced images, in a fraction of the time usually associated with the task. Its still in the development stage, but the render times are incredibly small - we're talking seconds and minutes, rather than hours - and the whole thing is pretty much independent of your graphics technology.