Multi GPU

[ravenzep]

Hello!

When is that coming? We are in the middle of 2013. And i see on the forum its been mentioned sometime in 2011. I mean for us users that have multiple gpu. It seems that this renderer isn't quite "cost effective" now is it?

LuxRender can already do MultiGPU bi directional rendering.

[OnoSendai]

Hi ravenzep,
We are working on having the capability in Indigo to do almost all of the computation on the GPU. When we have this multi-GPU support will work much better and should follow shortly.

Until then there's not much point as the CPU is usually the bottleneck.

[ravenzep]

Thats bloody Fantastic. Will it be able to handle large datasets / meshes? Or is it bound to GPU memory like the rest of the GPU renderers?

[OnoSendai]

It will definitely be bound to GPU memory at first. We may look into something more complicated later

[ravenzep]

But why not let Indigo customers decide if they want to render out of core or not, based on scene size

Small scenes = fast , BIG scenes = a bit slower

[Juju]

But why not let Indigo customers decide if they want to render out of core or not, based on scene size

Small scenes = fast , BIG scenes = a bit slower

you already have the render affinity choice, CPU or GPU. CPU handles all render type options, GPU only a few.

[ravenzep]

What you don't know is that OpenCL on the CPU runs faster than pure C++ on the cpu. LuxRender proves that pretty good.

[Zom-B]

What you don't know is that OpenCL on the CPU runs faster than pure C++ on the cpu. FluxRender proves that pretty good.

No it doesn't!

[PureSpider]

What LuxRender proves is that their devs can fool their users pretty well

[galinette]

What you don't know is that OpenCL on the CPU runs faster than pure C++ on the cpu. FluxRender proves that pretty good.

An example is not a proof...

Also, since OpenCL on the CPU is, internally, a pure C++ implementation, we could rewrite the sentence "¨Pure C++ on the cpu runs faster than pure C++ on the cpu", which sounds weird

No it doesn't!

Well sometimes it does, if the base c++ implementation is poorly optimized. OpenCL tends to force to think parallel, which sometimes helps.

[ravenzep]

Gotta love when artists talk about C++...

Anyway Multi GPU isn't coming anytime soon for Indigo users

[OnoSendai]

Show some respect to the forum users ravenzep, or I will ban you.

[William]

Luxrender doesn't have full opencl rendering mode anyway. It has hybrid path rendering with opencl (ray intersections).
Then it has a completely seperate render engine called SmallLuxGPU (SLG), which is an opencl engine with a smaller feature set than that of Luxrender (but samples much quicker) and reads Luxrender scene files.
Luxrender is pretty good engine but it's slow (even with hybrid). Indigo probably 2-3x quicker (or more in some cases).

[galinette]

Gotta love when artists talk about C++...

And, you know, I'm not even an artist

[CTZn]

Gotta love when artists talk about C++...

And, you know, I'm not even an artist

Brag not, you senior coder !