This is like a worst-case scenario for YouTube's compression algorithms, so it's hard to say how this would actually look on your screen. Rather than seeing the noise you just see the macroblocks even at highest resolution.
I've been playing with OctaneRender and LuxRender but hadn't heard of this one before. Looks good, possibly faster than Octane judging by the video, but it's impossible to know what they are running it on.
I'm very hopeful that incremental improvements to path tracing algorithms over the next couple of years will reduce the amount of noise in real-time, as the render quality is amazing. However even on a high end machine, with a complex scene you end up with a lot of black areas, which makes everything look darker. LuxRender partially solves this by rendering over the top of the last frame by default, but that sometimes creates some nasty ghosting effects that can be worse than always painting over black like Octane does.
If you want to try this stuff out there's a free demo version of Octane you can download and LuxRender is entirely free. However Octane requires a CUDA card with a fair bit of VRAM as it does everything in GPU and the size of the scene is limited by the amount of VRAM you have.
LuxRender is currently only stable in CPU-only mode and doesn't come with any UI to speak of; it's more of a rendering toolkit. You can't just open it up and move a scene around in real-time. You can do that with Octane though and I thoroughly recommend giving it a try.
There seem to be a fairly significant diminishing returns over rendering time with path tracing, so the results you get in real-time will probably be about the same on a wide variety of cards, i.e., full of noise and black areas, but still impressive. The difference between a render running for 4 hours vs one running for 8 hours is far less significant than the difference between 10 seconds compared to a minute.
Edit: I just noticed that Brigade is from Otoy, who own Octane Render. The site's not particularly clear about it, but it looks like this is their cloud-based render farm solution based on Octane. There's an earlier video somewhere showing real-time movie-quality rendering over something like 144 GPUs (instead of the 2-4 in this video). However the cost for renting that much GPU power was pretty astronomical.
Couldn't it be much faster considering it runs 'in the cloud'? I'd expect it to be faster than when rendering on the client. You should probably try Octane instead of VRAY: https://twitter.com/CapeTownC4D/status/451785257289666560
It can always get faster and it will. :) Everyone is moving to GPU-based renders right now, even V-Ray.
I do notice that sometimes this render doesn't respond immediately to mouse movement. Must be some bug. This cloud render of a Porche Cayman is much more responsive:
http://Clara.io is actually a web-based modeling and rendering tool that also allows you to seamless embed your work in web pages like this as either render embeds or as WebGL embeds.
PS. I also think some of our infrastructure is straining a bit with +100 concurrent renders streams.
Yup, both of them take at least 1-2 seconds to respond to mouse movements. Could you do WebGL and blend into ray-traced? Have you seen what Octane/Brigade (not exactly same tech, but close) can do in realtime? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y (you probably have)
Anyways, Brigade is coming to cloud as well on AWS GPU instances, so it would probably be easy for you to just use their solution integrated within your modeling tool then.
It is possible to integrate Octane/Brigade into our offering. The renderer, be it ThreeJS or V-Ray or Octane, is already a separable model from our tool.
Here is the same scene using our ThreeJS renderer (e.i. WebGL) integration:
In fact, we & Klaas Nienhuis have done something like that with this interactive demo. The lighting is done via V-Ray but it is baked into the WebGL textures:
It is a higher resolution custom model with higher resolution textures. The game model is a bit too simple I find. I give credits for the model in the link. :)
Apparently requires 2 Titan's to render. I wonder what you'd be able to pull off if money was no object