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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 marketi

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 6y 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.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  V-Ray on GPU will swap in the sense that it offloads textures out of the GPU and then re-uploads them later for another bucket while still rendering the same frame. And you know, just because everyone is adding GPU support doesn't mean that professionals will switch their entire pipeline and render farms on their heads just to use it. I acknowledge that they have GPU support and that some people like it, but I personally can usually not use it, so it is also not a purchase decision for me. Plus, people already have large farms of high-memory high-CPU servers without GPUs, so switching would require lots of expensive hardware purchases. And you usually render so many frames in parallel that it doesn't really matter if the single frame takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes. You just fire up 10x more servers and your total wait time remains the same.
  - dahart 6y ago
    > just because everyone is adding GPU support doesn't mean that professionals will switch their entire pipeline and render farms on their heads just to use it. You’re right, it doesn’t. The fact is that it’s already happening with or without you. Widespread GPU support being added is a symptom of what productions are asking for, not the cause.

dahart 6y 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.

fxtentacle 6y ago
V-Ray on GPU will swap in the sense that it offloads textures out of the GPU and then re-uploads them later for another bucket while still rendering the same frame. And you know, just because everyone is adding GPU support doesn't mean that professionals will switch their entire pipeline and render farms on their heads just to use it. I acknowledge that they have GPU support and that some people like it, but I personally can usually not use it, so it is also not a purchase decision for me. Plus, people already have large farms of high-memory high-CPU servers without GPUs, so switching would require lots of expensive hardware purchases. And you usually render so many frames in parallel that it doesn't really matter if the single frame takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes. You just fire up 10x more servers and your total wait time remains the same.
- dahart 6y ago
  > just because everyone is adding GPU support doesn't mean that professionals will switch their entire pipeline and render farms on their heads just to use it. You’re right, it doesn’t. The fact is that it’s already happening with or without you. Widespread GPU support being added is a symptom of what productions are asking for, not the cause.