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With $57'000 for 77'400 images, the costs are below $1 per image. However, there are only 461 scenes => $123 per scene. They mention vCPU years to perform the r

With $57'000 for 77'400 images, the costs are below $1 per image. However, there are only 461 scenes => $123 per scene. They mention vCPU years to perform the rendering. I wonder whether GPUs would be more cost-efficient and feasible for this rendering task.

Icko 6y ago
We are doing something similar. I could not get V-Ray to actually use the GPU, and the guys from ChaosGroup were like "it works at our side". We ended up just using CPU.
jankotek 6y ago
I believe GPU would be more expensive, it would increase human labor too much. CPU is universal and has more RAM. Optimizing very sophisticated ray tracing for GPU with tiny amount of VRAM could be very tricky. It is easier to do dirty code on CPU, and wait for couple of weeks. Apple also had spare CPU cycles. This stuff could run overnight in background.
- mikeroberts3000 6y ago
  Hi! I lead the development of this dataset. I'm delighted that it found its way onto Hacker News :D I think GPU rendering would be cheaper if it was possible. See my post above.
Geee 6y ago
Yes, it would be much cheaper if they used GPU renderer such as OctaneRender https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ However it might lack some features or flexibility compared to V-Ray.
- dahart 6y ago
  V-ray is a GPU (and CPU) renderer. https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray-gpu https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray-gpu
mikeroberts3000 6y ago
Hi! I lead the development of this dataset. I'm delighted that it found its way onto Hacker News :D Anyway, I'd love to do all of this rendering on the GPU in future. I'm sure that would be more cost-efficient. When I looked into this topic last year, I remember finding out that GPU rendering with V-Ray is not as flexible in terms of generating all of the different ground truth layers that we want. The ground truth layers that we ship in our public release are a subset of all the layers we generate. Have a look at our public source code for more details. I don't believe it's possible to generate all of those layers on the GPU. But I'd love to be wrong about this!
dragontamer 6y ago
> I wonder whether GPUs would be more cost-efficient and feasible for this rendering task. GPUs are a superior computer for raytracing calculations. But... CPUs have the software advantage: decades of engineering effort have been poured into CPU-renderers. While we're at the point where GPU-rendering is starting to become a thing, it will inevitably take decades of engineering to recreate all of those features on the GPU. One important GPU specific problem is the shortage of RAM: CPUs always have more RAM available (even if that CPU-RAM is much much slower). Teaming up the CPU + GPU to handle the RAM problem for large scenes is going to take significant effort. The general ideas are known in research papers and whatever, but not really ported to the actual tools yet. Disney's Moana dataset is known to take ~100GBs of geometry data / textures / animations. But there's no GPU on the planet that can hold all that data. So you'd have to make a CPU+GPU team to take on that problem.
Dork1234 6y ago
From my experience rendering on GPU is not worth it when you have a lot of images to generate. Generally you want budget your CPUs cores to render a bunch of images at the same time instead of one (or a few) images really fast. The more threads/buckets/blocks/threads you have with V-Ray the more overhead you are paying for. If you know what you are doing you should be able to saturate your NAS speed and/or Network bandwidth. The other thing to consider is the evermotion dataset might contain a lot of V-Ray Materials and Layers that might be CPU only. At one point Chaosgroup had a list of all the difference between CPU/GPU, but it appears they either solved all of them and/or took the page down.
- mikeroberts3000 6y ago
  Ah, this is all good info. Thank you. And great point about Evermotion + V-Ray materials that are CPU-only. It is certainly possible that some of those materials are CPU-only. I think the Chaos Group documentation you're thinking of is here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VMAX/V-Ray+GPU+Supported+Features https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VMAX/V-Ray+GPU+Supported... Indeed, at least according to this documentation, some of the render elements we are relying on to generate the Hypersim dataset are unsupported on the GPU.

Icko 6y ago

We are doing something similar. I could not get V-Ray to actually use the GPU, and the guys from ChaosGroup were like "it works at our side". We ended up just using CPU.

jankotek 6y ago

I believe GPU would be more expensive, it would increase human labor too much. CPU is universal and has more RAM. Optimizing very sophisticated ray tracing for GPU with tiny amount of VRAM could be very tricky. It is easier to do dirty code on CPU, and wait for couple of weeks. Apple also had spare CPU cycles. This stuff could run overnight in background.

mikeroberts3000 6y ago
Hi! I lead the development of this dataset. I'm delighted that it found its way onto Hacker News :D I think GPU rendering would be cheaper if it was possible. See my post above.

Geee 6y ago

Yes, it would be much cheaper if they used GPU renderer such as OctaneRender https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ However it might lack some features or flexibility compared to V-Ray.

dahart 6y ago
V-ray is a GPU (and CPU) renderer. https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray-gpu https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray-gpu

mikeroberts3000 6y ago

Hi! I lead the development of this dataset. I'm delighted that it found its way onto Hacker News :D Anyway, I'd love to do all of this rendering on the GPU in future. I'm sure that would be more cost-efficient. When I looked into this topic last year, I remember finding out that GPU rendering with V-Ray is not as flexible in terms of generating all of the different ground truth layers that we want. The ground truth layers that we ship in our public release are a subset of all the layers we generate. Have a look at our public source code for more details. I don't believe it's possible to generate all of those layers on the GPU. But I'd love to be wrong about this!

dragontamer 6y ago

> I wonder whether GPUs would be more cost-efficient and feasible for this rendering task. GPUs are a superior computer for raytracing calculations. But... CPUs have the software advantage: decades of engineering effort have been poured into CPU-renderers. While we're at the point where GPU-rendering is starting to become a thing, it will inevitably take decades of engineering to recreate all of those features on the GPU. One important GPU specific problem is the shortage of RAM: CPUs always have more RAM available (even if that CPU-RAM is much much slower). Teaming up the CPU + GPU to handle the RAM problem for large scenes is going to take significant effort. The general ideas are known in research papers and whatever, but not really ported to the actual tools yet. Disney's Moana dataset is known to take ~100GBs of geometry data / textures / animations. But there's no GPU on the planet that can hold all that data. So you'd have to make a CPU+GPU team to take on that problem.

Dork1234 6y ago

From my experience rendering on GPU is not worth it when you have a lot of images to generate. Generally you want budget your CPUs cores to render a bunch of images at the same time instead of one (or a few) images really fast. The more threads/buckets/blocks/threads you have with V-Ray the more overhead you are paying for. If you know what you are doing you should be able to saturate your NAS speed and/or Network bandwidth. The other thing to consider is the evermotion dataset might contain a lot of V-Ray Materials and Layers that might be CPU only. At one point Chaosgroup had a list of all the difference between CPU/GPU, but it appears they either solved all of them and/or took the page down.

mikeroberts3000 6y ago
Ah, this is all good info. Thank you. And great point about Evermotion + V-Ray materials that are CPU-only. It is certainly possible that some of those materials are CPU-only. I think the Chaos Group documentation you're thinking of is here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VMAX/V-Ray+GPU+Supported+Features https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VMAX/V-Ray+GPU+Supported... Indeed, at least according to this documentation, some of the render elements we are relying on to generate the Hypersim dataset are unsupported on the GPU.