Vray RT with the new Mac Pro (3ds max)

[jackdual]

Hi guys,

I work as a 3d artist and thinking of buying the new Mac Pro but one thing that bothers me is the dual AMD cards. I work alot with Vray RT, which I heard currently does not support AMD hardware. Has any one tested the new Mac Pro with the lastest Vray RT OpenCL? If you have please confirm to me if it works or not. Thank you very much guys

[Jeff Mottle]

I have the new Mac Pro (3.5Ghz 6-core Intel Xeon E5, 32GB RAM, Dual AMD FirePro D5000), are you thinking of using 3ds Max in Parallels or VMware or in Bootcamp? I don't have a bootcamp partition set up, but I do have 3ds Max running in Parallels. I ran a quick test and RT 3.0 seems to run with both CPU and OpenCL. I recorded a quick screencast so you could see. Keep in mind this is hardly the ideal setup. 3ds Max working in a virtualized environment that has not been fine tuned for performance. But shows at least that it does work.

 

The scene is a bunch of high poly instanced teapots (around 100 million polys). A lot more than a normal scene would have but you get the picture. If you have an actual scene you want me to test, package it up and send it to me and I'll try it out.

 

One thing I noticed (not sure if this is Windows 8.1, Parallels, or the "newness" of these GPUs), but none of the GPU monitoring apps worked. They would install, but not detect the cards.

 

[jackdual]

Thanks Jeff for the test, the result seems positive. I guess i'll be installing windows via bootcamp to use Max. Are u able to choose which GPU for OpenCL?, because I want to use just 1 GPU for Active shade and the other for viewport and leave the CPU free

[chrisnewman]

Thanks Jeff for the test, the result seems positive. I guess i'll be installing windows via bootcamp to use Max. Are u able to choose which GPU for OpenCL?, because I want to use just 1 GPU for Active shade and the other for viewport and leave the CPU free

 

Hi jack I'm a recently joined member of cgarchitect. Did u get vray rt working under bootcamp?

[jackdual]

Hi Chris, VrayRT works on the nMP under bootcamp but unfortunately it will only use the CPU to render. As soon as u switch to the GPU it will crash. At the moment I think only Lux render and Indigo work on those GPUs.

[chrisnewman]

I haven't got it to crash yet but Im not sure I have it configured properly. There are any reason why it would work under Parallels and not under Bootcamp? I have AMD Catalyt installed BTW to enable Crossfire to split the workload between the GPUs. Are you using Crossfire? Im just trying to see if Ive missing configuring anything. I can configure the OpenCL devices. But that hasnt help.

[jackdual]

I tested RT on bootcamp (Windows 8.1) with both Apple bootcamp driver and AMD catalyst, neither work for me. By default Vray openCL device check the CPU and both GPUs, but if I uncheck the CPU, leaving only GPUs to render it crashed instantly. Have you tried unchecking the CPU and see how it goes?

As for crossfire, I believe it doesn't have any impact on Vray RT performance as you are able to use one or both GPUs regardless. Btw, the performance on 3Ds max viewport using AMD catalyst is horrible, not sure if I've done anything wrong though.

[stefanostrika]

Seems it works fine for this guy from the Chaosgroup forum(registration required):

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?78805-new-MAC-PRO&p=626739#post626739

 

"Vray RT GPU OpenCL: With the latest beta Catalyst drivers it works flawlessly"

[chrisnewman]

I tested RT on bootcamp (Windows 8.1) with both Apple bootcamp driver and AMD catalyst, neither work for me. By default Vray openCL device check the CPU and both GPUs, but if I uncheck the CPU, leaving only GPUs to render it crashed instantly. Have you tried unchecking the CPU and see how it goes?

As for crossfire, I believe it doesn't have any impact on Vray RT performance as you are able to use one or both GPUs regardless. Btw, the performance on 3Ds max viewport using AMD catalyst is horrible, not sure if I've done anything wrong though.

When you say Bootcamp with the Apple bootcamp driver, does installing Bootcamp mean you also install the Apple bootcamp driver as part of the process. I have bootcamp installed but cant remember installing any separate drivers

[jackdual]

I installed windows 8.1 using Bootcamp assistant that comes with the mac, when you open it to create windows 8 install disk, it has an option to "download the latest windows support software from apple", which is checked by default. The graphics card driver is included in the download

[chrisnewman]

I think Ive worked it out but need to confirm a few things first. How much faster should RT GPU be compared to RT CPU? Am i right to assume that the GPU is only used for activeshade not the production renderer? The D700 GPU has 6 GB Vram so can i take that to mean it will handle a 1500x650 RT render but wont handle a 4000x2000 RT render (would that explain these very large blank (black) areas in my render)

Edited August 18, 2014 by chrisnewman
extend comments

[jackdual]

Hi Chris,

Did u use AMD Catalyst or Bootcamp driver to get RT working?

Regarding the RT performance, I havent got a chance to test it with AMD cards so I cant really tell. However, a GTX780Ti (2880 Cores @ 870Mhz on VrayRT CUDA) is 15-20 times faster than an i7 4930k (6 Cores @ 3.5Ghz on VrayRT OpenCL). The D700 each holds 2048 Cores @ 850Mhz, but it cannot use CUDA. I couldnt test them on RT OpenCL due to driver issue.

From my personal experience using VrayRT, I dont think it is ready to be a production render yet. For example, if you got a simple scene with 3-4 lights, few reflection, refraction and such. then RT is perfect. But if you put in ~10 lights, and lots of materials like glass, gems, water. You will start to see lots of noise and white pixels that will take hell of a long time to render, and there will still be noise and several white spots left on your final image. To get production quality at 15-20x speed on a complex scene, you will need several GPUs working together.

I only use RT to preview lights placement and materials. Also to render out background objects as I dont need them to be clear. It does speed up my workflow alot.

And what do u mean by 1500x650 and 4000x2000? Did u mean image resolution?

[stefanostrika]

a GTX780Ti (2880 Cores @ 870Mhz on VrayRT CUDA) is 15-20 times faster than an i7 4930k.

Seems very unlikely. Maybe if you are just using it for very simple scenes, start to throw at your machine complex interiors with tons of polygons, materials and lights and you will see that modern CPUs will match and easily exceed GPU performance(even Vlado says so, you better to believe to him;) ).

[chrisnewman]

Hi Chris,

Did u use AMD Catalyst or Bootcamp driver to get RT working?

Regarding the RT performance, I havent got a chance to test it with AMD cards so I cant really tell. However, a GTX780Ti (2880 Cores @ 870Mhz on VrayRT CUDA) is 15-20 times faster than an i7 4930k (6 Cores @ 3.5Ghz on VrayRT OpenCL). The D700 each holds 2048 Cores @ 850Mhz, but it cannot use CUDA. I couldnt test them on RT OpenCL due to driver issue.

From my personal experience using VrayRT, I dont think it is ready to be a production render yet. For example, if you got a simple scene with 3-4 lights, few reflection, refraction and such. then RT is perfect. But if you put in ~10 lights, and lots of materials like glass, gems, water. You will start to see lots of noise and white pixels that will take hell of a long time to render, and there will still be noise and several white spots left on your final image. To get production quality at 15-20x speed on a complex scene, you will need several GPUs working together.

I only use RT to preview lights placement and materials. Also to render out background objects as I dont need them to be clear. It does speed up my workflow alot.

And what do u mean by 1500x650 and 4000x2000? Did u mean image resolution?

 

I followed KAKTUSDIGITAL's advice in this thread over the ChaosGroup site

 

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?78805-new-MAC-PRO

 

 

 

Vray: Nothing to report here, it works as expected

 

Vray RT GPU OpenCL: With the latest beta Catalyst drivers it works flawlessly. Very surprised. The interesting thing is that these drivers are the standard gaming ones which recognise the cards as being Radeon 7970's.

 

So far, everything seems to be running smoothly. The box, I mean cylinder does get quite toasty warm when really pushing it with gaming and RT but the fan is still pretty darn quiet.

 

Yes I am referring to the approx image resolution in last point.

[chrisnewman]

Hi Chris,

Did u use AMD Catalyst or Bootcamp driver to get RT working?

Regarding the RT performance, I havent got a chance to test it with AMD cards so I cant really tell. However, a GTX780Ti (2880 Cores @ 870Mhz on VrayRT CUDA) is 15-20 times faster than an i7 4930k (6 Cores @ 3.5Ghz on VrayRT OpenCL). The D700 each holds 2048 Cores @ 850Mhz, but it cannot use CUDA. I couldnt test them on RT OpenCL due to driver issue.

From my personal experience using VrayRT, I dont think it is ready to be a production render yet. For example, if you got a simple scene with 3-4 lights, few reflection, refraction and such. then RT is perfect. But if you put in ~10 lights, and lots of materials like glass, gems, water. You will start to see lots of noise and white pixels that will take hell of a long time to render, and there will still be noise and several white spots left on your final image. To get production quality at 15-20x speed on a complex scene, you will need several GPUs working together.

I only use RT to preview lights placement and materials. Also to render out background objects as I dont need them to be clear. It does speed up my workflow alot.

And what do u mean by 1500x650 and 4000x2000? Did u mean image resolution?

 

 

How is the Frame buffer different to the RT activeshade. I notice the first is a lot slower to render than the latter but produce much better quality images