RenderTarget or Camera centric engine design ?

The engine I'm currently working on has a RenderTarget centric design, a lot like Ogre's.
A RenderTarget centric design means that all the rendering is done around RenderTargets:
The rendering window is a render target, the shadow maps are render targets etc...

Essentially a render target can have viewports, and each viewport has a camera.
This is good for doing things like multi-viewports views in games (like split screens), and it's easy to just add a viewport to a render target and configure a camera for it.
An advantage of this technique is that it minimizes render target changes, you set the render target, collect all viewports and cameras associated with it, then get all the visible objects and render them; rince repeat.
Obviously the downside is a lot of changes in camera matrices and viewports.

Recently I have acquired the book Game Engine gems 1, and in particular the gem by Colt McAnlis from Blizzard Entertainment caught my attention.
He describes a camera-centric engine design for multi-threaded rendering.
In his design everything is a camera and his association is done via a RenderView structure:
The RenderView struct groups the camera, frustum, render target and all the rendering commands.
This allows him to build drawing command buffers in parallel and then submit them to the API, grouped to minimize state changes.

At first I was bit against his design (after all we're all a bit reluctant to changes especially after working so long on a different design that does the job), but I realized that a camera-centric approach might facilitate dealing with things like portal-rendering which my design didn't account for at all.
That doesn't mean it's not possible to do with my current engine, just that I didn't think of that and I believe that a camera-centric design makes more sense; every camera contribute their view data to the final scene, including portal cameras.

In conclusion, RenderTarget centric design starts from a render target and move toward cameras, whereas camera-centric designs move from cameras to render targets.
Both design are good, and help structure the rendering engine, but a camera-centric design might reflect more how we think about cameras in real life; at least compared to the RenderTarget design which might seem backwards.

Hot config for people looking to spend big

If you are thinking of upgrading or buying a new computer, have a load of cash, and want to be future proof for a while (read >= 5 years) then this configuration would suit you:

Motherboard:EVGA Classified Super Record 2 (SR-2) about AUD1000
Processors: 2x Intel Xeon X5680 Gulftown, 3.33GHz, Six Core hyper-threaded about AUD2000 each
RAM: 12 hand-picked, hand-tested DIMMs, 48GB of ultra-high capacity at 1,900MHz, CL8 G.Skill Ripjaws
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower 1500W PSU about AUD500
GPUs: 4x ATI Radeon HD5870 2GB OR 2x ATI Radeon HD5970 2GB (optional 1x Nvidia GTX480 (PhysX + 3D)) roughly AUD2000

And that does not even include the case (which will have to specifically support that over-sized HPTX motherboard) nor its cooling.
For a case (that does not exist yet), have a look at Mick64's dream case on extreme system or this Lian Li case.

And if you do build something like that, don't forget to post pictures and brag about it in forums, you deserve it :)