8 GPU System Benchmarking

[joe.renderstream]

Hello All,

In about a week or so I'll be getting an 8 GPU system for internal testing and benchmarking here at RenderStream. I plan to benchmark most of the main GPU renderers including indigo. I plan to see how the renderer performs in an 8 card configuration, as well as looking at how well it scales from 1-8 GPUs, power consumption etc..

Also, I'm hoping to get some input from you guys on what else you'd like to see tested. Is there a test suite of scene files available? Or, If someone has a type of scene in mind that they would like to see tested, or a scene you can share, please let me know.

The machine can hold 8 cards. Listed below are the cards I'll have for testing in various configurations:

8 GTX 580
2 GTX 580 Phantom
2 GTX 590
8 HD6970
8 Tesla C2070

Thanks!

_________________
Joe Pizzini
RenderStream
http://www.renderstream.com
blog.renderstream.com

[joe.renderstream]

It looks like I misunderstood the features of the renderer. If in fact it is offloading "some" of the CPU's computations onto the GPU, I don't think there would be a need for more than one GPU when using indigo at this time.

It sounds like the whole scene does not get offloaded to the GPU but rather the cpu sends the GPU as much work as it can handle. So the bottleneck would be on the CPU.

Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Cheers,
_________________
Joe Pizzini
RenderStream
http://www.renderstream.com
blog.renderstream.com

[OnoSendai]

Hi Joe,
That's correct, currently Indigo uses the GPU as a co-processor to offload the ray-tracing calculations to. Depending on the scene complexity, either the GPU or CPU can be the bottleneck.

Currently Indigo only supports using 1 GPU at once, however this may change in the future.

[neo0.]

Hi Joe,
That's correct, currently Indigo uses the GPU as a co-processor to offload the ray-tracing calculations to. Depending on the scene complexity, either the GPU or CPU can be the bottleneck.

Currently Indigo only supports using 1 GPU at once, however this may change in the future.

So indigo basically uses the GPU in the same fashion that it does the CPU?

[StompinTom]

Hi Joe,
That's correct, currently Indigo uses the GPU as a co-processor to offload the ray-tracing calculations to. Depending on the scene complexity, either the GPU or CPU can be the bottleneck.

Currently Indigo only supports using 1 GPU at once, however this may change in the future.

So indigo basically uses the GPU in the same fashion that it does the CPU?

It's the same way Lux uses the GPU, as well as other commercial engines. I believe Octane is the only engine that *only* uses the GPU for rendering. As always it's a tradeoff; in this case Indigo has access to all the system RAM (crucial for large scenes) instead of just the video RAM, which is a lot less.

[neo0.]

I would have expected that the GPU would be more suited to rendering.. given that thats's what it was basically designed to do in the first place (ok, so most games don't use ray tracing but its still graphically heavy.)

[StompinTom]

I would have expected that the GPU would be more suited to rendering.. given that thats's what it was basically designed to do in the first place (ok, so most games don't use ray tracing but its still graphically heavy.)

...

[neo0.]

I'll be the first one to admit im no expert, but I don't see whats so odd about that statement. I mean it is called graphics processing unit, which would suggest that it's better at doing visual things. It just seems a little counter intuitive to treat something the same way when it was designed from the ground up to do a different thing.

Just my 2 cents.

[PureSpider]

I mean it is called graphics processing unit, which would suggest that it's better at doing visual things. It just seems a little counter intuitive to treat something the same way when it was designed from the ground up to do a different thing.

Why do you keep assuming it's being treated the SAME?
And why do you keep assuming that "graphics" is always the same?
I think you will aggree that playing Crysis 2 is not exactly the same as rendering an image with some unbiased rendering engine?