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The trend in renderers is extremely clear, nearly everybody is building a GPU version, and the makers and their users all report pretty big speedups with GPUs..

by dahart 7y ago

The trend in renderers is extremely clear, nearly everybody is building a GPU version, and the makers and their users all report pretty big speedups with GPUs... > Because anyone can pipe their shit through Intel Open Image Denoise after the fact. It’s free even. The same is true of the OptiX denoiser. I’m not sure what point you’re making? > Not least in the amount of noise it produces using comparable sampling settings. Without using any GPU compute. The amount of noise has nothing to do with GPU vs CPU.

virtualritz 7y ago
> The trend in renderers is extremely clear, nearly everybody is building a GPU version, and the makers and their users all report pretty big speedups with GPUs... The 'trend' of the US government under president Trump is also extremely clear. Sorry, I couldn't resist. :) TLDR; This 'trend' is not economically viable except for two parties. Makers of GPUs and companies renting out GPU rigs in the cloud. Aka: it's just a trend. It's not that anyone sat down and really looked a the numbers. Because if they did this trend wouldn't exist. It's also history repeating itself for those that do not learn from it. It will not go anywhere. Mark my words. I've been there, in 2005/2006, when NVIDIA tried to convince everyone that we should buy their Gelato GPU renderer. I can elaborate why that went nowhere and why it will go nowhere again. But it's a tad off topic.
- dahart 7y ago
  Feel free to elaborate, I have no idea what your point is here or what you mean with your non-sequitur about the government or how that relates to developers of 3d renderers in any way. I don't know what you mean by "it's just a trend." The fact is that there's evidence for my argument, and you're attempting to dismiss it without any evidence. Comparing Gelato to RTX seems bizarre, they're not related, other than that they're both Nvidia products. Are you trying to say you distrust Nvidia? RTX already is a commercial success, and there are already dozens of games & rendering softwares using RTX on the market and hundreds more building on it. RTX already went somewhere.
  - virtualritz 7y ago
    I am not talking about games. I am talking about offline rendering only. My point was that indeed bizarre things can become trends and it doesn't make them less bizarre.
  - virtualritz 7y ago
    > Comparing Gelato to RTX seems bizarre, they're not related, [...] I did not compare RTX with Gelato. Where do you find the word 'RTX' in any of my replies? I compared Gelato as a GPU-based offline renderer with other contemporary GPU offline renderers.
fxtentacle 7y ago
No. My scenes usually need 40+ GB of memory to render. Trying to put that onto a 11 GB RAM GPU will swap like hell and be excruciatingly slow. It's rendering much faster on CPU.
- dahart 7y ago
  Huh? No what? What are you referring to? Is this a reply to a different sub-thread? > Trying to put that onto a 11 GB RAM GPU will swap like hell and be excruciatingly slow The comment you replied to didn't mention memory, but what renderer are you currently using that will swap while using the GPU? What are you referring to when you say "that", in "Trying to put that onto a 11 GB RAM GPU"? Does the RAM limit of your GPU mean that mine will go slower too?
  - virtualritz 7y ago
    I am reading between the lines here but I think he is saying that the 'trend' you are talking about is a figment of your own and the imagination of some marketing folks from some companies -- combined. I.e. it has no substance from a user's pov a priori (his point) and it has no substance from the pov of someone looking at the numbers of this a posteriori (my point, elsewhere in this tread, which I am happy to actually back up any time). I mean a Quadro 8k RTX can stash 48GB. Standard on 3D artist workstations is 128GB today. Even my freelancer friends have this in their boxes now at the very least. Go figure what is standard RAM size on render rigs on farms these days based on that ... And that's not even considering compute restrictions on these GPU rigs that make them simply unfit for certain scenes.
    - dahart 7y ago
      Please do, instead of claiming you can back it up, please just do it, what are you waiting for? The list of offline renderers adding GPU ray tracing support is pretty long. If you think the trend isn't real, then are you saying you believe the list isn't growing? If you think it's imagination, maybe you could produce the list of serious commercial renderers that are not adding GPU support, and perhaps evidence they're not currently working on it. RenderMan, Arnold, Blender, Vray, Modo, RedShift, Iray, Clarisse, KeyShot, Octane, VRED, FurryBall, Arion, Enscape, FluidRay, Indigo, Lumion, LuxRender, Maxwell, Thea, Substance Painter, Mantra... pretty sure there are whole bunch more... not to mention Unreal & Unity. It's quite true that memory limits are a serious consideration. Which is why, currently, GPU renderers that swap aren't generally a thing. They will be in the future, but right now you get CPU fallback, not swap. So seeing the claim about swap in the comment makes it suspect. Despite the trend and various improvements will continue to be a factor for a while as the limits improve. That doesn't change the trend. It means that preview is currently a bigger GPU workflow than final frame.

by dahart 7y ago

virtualritz 7y ago

> The trend in renderers is extremely clear, nearly everybody is building a GPU version, and the makers and their users all report pretty big speedups with GPUs... The 'trend' of the US government under president Trump is also extremely clear. Sorry, I couldn't resist. :) TLDR; This 'trend' is not economically viable except for two parties. Makers of GPUs and companies renting out GPU rigs in the cloud. Aka: it's just a trend. It's not that anyone sat down and really looked a the numbers. Because if they did this trend wouldn't exist. It's also history repeating itself for those that do not learn from it. It will not go anywhere. Mark my words. I've been there, in 2005/2006, when NVIDIA tried to convince everyone that we should buy their Gelato GPU renderer. I can elaborate why that went nowhere and why it will go nowhere again. But it's a tad off topic.

dahart 7y ago
Feel free to elaborate, I have no idea what your point is here or what you mean with your non-sequitur about the government or how that relates to developers of 3d renderers in any way. I don't know what you mean by "it's just a trend." The fact is that there's evidence for my argument, and you're attempting to dismiss it without any evidence. Comparing Gelato to RTX seems bizarre, they're not related, other than that they're both Nvidia products. Are you trying to say you distrust Nvidia? RTX already is a commercial success, and there are already dozens of games & rendering softwares using RTX on the market and hundreds more building on it. RTX already went somewhere.
- virtualritz 7y ago
  I am not talking about games. I am talking about offline rendering only. My point was that indeed bizarre things can become trends and it doesn't make them less bizarre.
- virtualritz 7y ago
  > Comparing Gelato to RTX seems bizarre, they're not related, [...] I did not compare RTX with Gelato. Where do you find the word 'RTX' in any of my replies? I compared Gelato as a GPU-based offline renderer with other contemporary GPU offline renderers.

fxtentacle 7y ago

No. My scenes usually need 40+ GB of memory to render. Trying to put that onto a 11 GB RAM GPU will swap like hell and be excruciatingly slow. It's rendering much faster on CPU.

dahart 7y ago
Huh? No what? What are you referring to? Is this a reply to a different sub-thread? > Trying to put that onto a 11 GB RAM GPU will swap like hell and be excruciatingly slow The comment you replied to didn't mention memory, but what renderer are you currently using that will swap while using the GPU? What are you referring to when you say "that", in "Trying to put that onto a 11 GB RAM GPU"? Does the RAM limit of your GPU mean that mine will go slower too?
- virtualritz 7y ago
  I am reading between the lines here but I think he is saying that the 'trend' you are talking about is a figment of your own and the imagination of some marketing folks from some companies -- combined. I.e. it has no substance from a user's pov a priori (his point) and it has no substance from the pov of someone looking at the numbers of this a posteriori (my point, elsewhere in this tread, which I am happy to actually back up any time). I mean a Quadro 8k RTX can stash 48GB. Standard on 3D artist workstations is 128GB today. Even my freelancer friends have this in their boxes now at the very least. Go figure what is standard RAM size on render rigs on farms these days based on that ... And that's not even considering compute restrictions on these GPU rigs that make them simply unfit for certain scenes.
  - dahart 7y ago
    Please do, instead of claiming you can back it up, please just do it, what are you waiting for? The list of offline renderers adding GPU ray tracing support is pretty long. If you think the trend isn't real, then are you saying you believe the list isn't growing? If you think it's imagination, maybe you could produce the list of serious commercial renderers that are not adding GPU support, and perhaps evidence they're not currently working on it. RenderMan, Arnold, Blender, Vray, Modo, RedShift, Iray, Clarisse, KeyShot, Octane, VRED, FurryBall, Arion, Enscape, FluidRay, Indigo, Lumion, LuxRender, Maxwell, Thea, Substance Painter, Mantra... pretty sure there are whole bunch more... not to mention Unreal & Unity. It's quite true that memory limits are a serious consideration. Which is why, currently, GPU renderers that swap aren't generally a thing. They will be in the future, but right now you get CPU fallback, not swap. So seeing the claim about swap in the comment makes it suspect. Despite the trend and various improvements will continue to be a factor for a while as the limits improve. That doesn't change the trend. It means that preview is currently a bigger GPU workflow than final frame.