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All eyes are of course on AI, but with 192GB of VRAM I wonder if this or something like it could be good enough for high end production rendering. Pixar and co

All eyes are of course on AI, but with 192GB of VRAM I wonder if this or something like it could be good enough for high end production rendering. Pixar and co still use CPU clusters for all of their final frame rendering, even though the task is ostensibly a better fit for GPUs, mainly because their memory demands have usually been so far ahead of what even the biggest GPUs could offer. Much like with AI, Nvidia has the software side of GPU production rendering locked down tight though so that's just as much of an uphill battle for AMD.

Havoc 2y ago
I’d imagine ray tracing is a bit easier to paralize over lots of older cards. The computations aren’t as heavily linked and are more fault tolerant. So I doubt anyone is paying h100 style premiums
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Pixar is paying a massive premium; they probably are using an order of magnitude or two more CPUs than they would if they could use GPUs. Using a hundred CPUs in place of a single H100 is a greater-than-h100 style premium.
  - imjonse 2y ago
    Would Pixar's existing software run on GPUs without much work?
    - jsheard 2y ago
      It does already, at least on Nvidia GPUs: https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/pages/viewpage.action?mobileBypass=true&spaceKey=REN24&title=XPU https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/pages/viewpage.action?mobileBypas... They currently only use the GPU mode for quick iteration on relatively small slices of data though, and then switch back to CPU mode for the big renders.
- jsheard 2y ago
  The computations are easily parallelized, sure, but the data feeding those computations isn't easily partitioned. Every parallel render node needs as much memory as a lone render node would, and GPUs typically have nowhere near enough for the highest of high end productions. Last I heard they were putting around 128GB to 256GB of RAM in their machines and that was a few years ago.
PaulHoule 2y ago
One missed opportunity from the game streaming bubble would be a 20-or-so player game where one big machine draws everything for everybody and streams it.
- bob1029 2y ago
  Stuff like this is still of interest to me. There are some really compelling game ideas that only become possible once you look into modern HPC platforms and streaming.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    My son and I have wargamed it a bit. The trouble is there is a huge box of tricks used in open world and other complex single player games for conserving RAM that compete with just having a huge amount of RAM and it is not so clear the huge SMP machine with a huge GPU really comes out ahead in terms of creating a revolution in gaming. In the case of Stadia, however, failing to develop this was like a sports team not playing any home games. One way of thinking about the current crisis of the games industry and VR is that building 3-d worlds is too expensive and a major part of it is all the shoehorning tricks the industry depends on. Better hardware for games could be about lowering development cost as opposed to making fancier graphics but that tends to be a non-starter with companies whose core competence is getting 1000 highly-paid developers to struggle with difficult to use tools and the idea you could do the same with 10 ordinary developers is threatening to them.
    - bob1029 2y ago
      I am thinking beyond the scale of any given machine and traditional game engine architectures. I am thinking of an entire datacenter purpose-built to host a single game world, with edge locations handling the last mile of client-side prediction, viewport rendering, streaming and batching of input events. We already have a lot of the conceptual architecture figured out in places like the NYSE and CBOE - Processing hundreds of millions of events in less than a second on a single CPU core against one synchronous view of some world. We can do this with insane reliability and precision day after day. Many of the technology requirements that emerge from the single instance WoW path approximate what we have already accomplished in other domains.
JackYoustra 2y ago
It's probably implemented way differently, but I worry about the driver suitability. Gaming benchmarks at least perform substantially worse on AI accelerators than even many generations old GPUs, I wonder if this extends to custom graphics code too.
Arelius 2y ago
I work in this field, and I think so. This is actually the project I'm currently working on. I'm betting with current hardware and some clever tricks, we can resolve full production frames in real-time rates.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Havoc 2y ago

I’d imagine ray tracing is a bit easier to paralize over lots of older cards. The computations aren’t as heavily linked and are more fault tolerant. So I doubt anyone is paying h100 style premiums

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Pixar is paying a massive premium; they probably are using an order of magnitude or two more CPUs than they would if they could use GPUs. Using a hundred CPUs in place of a single H100 is a greater-than-h100 style premium.
- imjonse 2y ago
  Would Pixar's existing software run on GPUs without much work?
  - jsheard 2y ago
    It does already, at least on Nvidia GPUs: https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/pages/viewpage.action?mobileBypass=true&spaceKey=REN24&title=XPU https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/pages/viewpage.action?mobileBypas... They currently only use the GPU mode for quick iteration on relatively small slices of data though, and then switch back to CPU mode for the big renders.
jsheard 2y ago
The computations are easily parallelized, sure, but the data feeding those computations isn't easily partitioned. Every parallel render node needs as much memory as a lone render node would, and GPUs typically have nowhere near enough for the highest of high end productions. Last I heard they were putting around 128GB to 256GB of RAM in their machines and that was a few years ago.

PaulHoule 2y ago

One missed opportunity from the game streaming bubble would be a 20-or-so player game where one big machine draws everything for everybody and streams it.

bob1029 2y ago
Stuff like this is still of interest to me. There are some really compelling game ideas that only become possible once you look into modern HPC platforms and streaming.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  My son and I have wargamed it a bit. The trouble is there is a huge box of tricks used in open world and other complex single player games for conserving RAM that compete with just having a huge amount of RAM and it is not so clear the huge SMP machine with a huge GPU really comes out ahead in terms of creating a revolution in gaming. In the case of Stadia, however, failing to develop this was like a sports team not playing any home games. One way of thinking about the current crisis of the games industry and VR is that building 3-d worlds is too expensive and a major part of it is all the shoehorning tricks the industry depends on. Better hardware for games could be about lowering development cost as opposed to making fancier graphics but that tends to be a non-starter with companies whose core competence is getting 1000 highly-paid developers to struggle with difficult to use tools and the idea you could do the same with 10 ordinary developers is threatening to them.
  - bob1029 2y ago
    I am thinking beyond the scale of any given machine and traditional game engine architectures. I am thinking of an entire datacenter purpose-built to host a single game world, with edge locations handling the last mile of client-side prediction, viewport rendering, streaming and batching of input events. We already have a lot of the conceptual architecture figured out in places like the NYSE and CBOE - Processing hundreds of millions of events in less than a second on a single CPU core against one synchronous view of some world. We can do this with insane reliability and precision day after day. Many of the technology requirements that emerge from the single instance WoW path approximate what we have already accomplished in other domains.

JackYoustra 2y ago

It's probably implemented way differently, but I worry about the driver suitability. Gaming benchmarks at least perform substantially worse on AI accelerators than even many generations old GPUs, I wonder if this extends to custom graphics code too.

Arelius 2y ago

I work in this field, and I think so. This is actually the project I'm currently working on. I'm betting with current hardware and some clever tricks, we can resolve full production frames in real-time rates.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]