4 ms·

The line I'm drawing is high-end VFX / CG is still IMO years away from using GPUs for final frame (with loads of AOVs and Deep output) rendering. Are GPUs star

by berkut 6y ago

The line I'm drawing is high-end VFX / CG is still IMO years away from using GPUs for final frame (with loads of AOVs and Deep output) rendering. Are GPUs starting to be used at earlier points in the pipeline? Yes, absolutely, but they always were to a degree in previs and modelling (via rasterisation). They are gradually becoming more useable at more steps in pipelines, but they're not there yet for high-end studios. In some cases, if a studio's happy using an off-the-shelf renderer with the stock shaders (so no custom shaders at all - at least until OSL is doing batching and GPU stuff, or until MDL actually supports production renderer stuff) studios can use GPUs further down the pipeline, and currently that's smaller scale stuff from what I gather talking to friends who are using Arnold GPU. Certainly the hero-level stuff at Weta / ILM / Framestore isn't being done with with GPUs, as they require custom shaders, and they aren't going to be happy with just using the stock shaders (which are much better than stock shaders from 6/7 years ago, but still far from bleeding edge in terms of BSDFs and patterns). Even from what I hear at Pixar with their lookdev Flow renderer things aren't completely rosy on the GPU front, although it is at least getting some use, and the expectation is XPU will take over there, but I don't think it's quite ready yet. Until a studio feels GPU rendering can be used for a significant amount of the renders (that they do, for smaller studios, the fidelity will be less, so the threshold will be lower for them), I think it's going to be a chicken-and-egg problem of not wanting to invest in GPUs on the farms (or even local workstations).

boulos 6y ago
I think you’re right about the current state (not quite there, especially in raw $$s), but the potential is finally good enough that folks are investing seriously on the software side. The folks at Framestore and many other shops already don’t do more than XX GiB per frame for their rendering. So for me, this comes down to “can we finally implement a good enough texture cache in optix/the community” which I understand Mark Leone is working on :). The shader thing seems easy enough. I’m not worried about an OSL compiled output running worse than the C-side. Divergence is a real issue, but so many studios are now using just a handful of BSDFs with lots of textures to drive, that as long as you don’t force the shading to be “per object group” but instead “per shader, varying inputs is fine”, you’ll still get high utilization. The 80 GiB parts will make it so that some shops could go fully in-core. I expect we’ll see that sooner than you’d think, just because people will start doing interactive work, never want to give it up, and then say “make that but better” for the finals.

by berkut 6y ago

boulos 6y ago

I think you’re right about the current state (not quite there, especially in raw $$s), but the potential is finally good enough that folks are investing seriously on the software side. The folks at Framestore and many other shops already don’t do more than XX GiB per frame for their rendering. So for me, this comes down to “can we finally implement a good enough texture cache in optix/the community” which I understand Mark Leone is working on :). The shader thing seems easy enough. I’m not worried about an OSL compiled output running worse than the C-side. Divergence is a real issue, but so many studios are now using just a handful of BSDFs with lots of textures to drive, that as long as you don’t force the shading to be “per object group” but instead “per shader, varying inputs is fine”, you’ll still get high utilization. The 80 GiB parts will make it so that some shops could go fully in-core. I expect we’ll see that sooner than you’d think, just because people will start doing interactive work, never want to give it up, and then say “make that but better” for the finals.