Lupaz Posted April 1, 2014 Share Posted April 1, 2014 Just FYI. Can Octane Render use multiple GPUs? Yes! Octane Render completely relies on the GPU for rendering performance and scales extremely well. If your motherboard can accept more than one video card, adding additional video cards will greatly improve Octane's rendering speed because Octane's performance scales perfectly with the number of GPUs (e.g. rendering with four GTX Titans will be 4x faster than using only 1 GTX Titan), without the need for SLI. The cards can be different models, allowing GPUs from two completely different architectures to be used in a machine with multiple PCI-E slots (such as a GTX 560 in the primary slot and a GTX 780 in the second). The cost of adding an additional Nvidia GPU to your system is very low compared to the cost of a small renderfarm of 10 to 15 computers to get the same performance with a CPU based rendering solution. Does Octane Render take advantage of SLI? No, but it can use multiple video cards for rendering (see above). It is also recommended to disable the SLI option in your Nvidia control panel to maximize Octane's rendering performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted April 1, 2014 Share Posted April 1, 2014 Most progressive renderers using GPGPU are like that. * All compatible OpenCL/CUDA devices recognized by the system can be used simultaneously. * SLI/Crossfire and identical cards are not a requirement. * All GPUs need to be able to "carry their own weight", i.e. fit the entire scene and assets + have room for the computational process in their own VRam buffer, otherwise will be excluded. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
numerobis Posted April 1, 2014 Share Posted April 1, 2014 Just FYI. Can Octane Render use multiple GPUs? Yes! Octane Render completely relies on the GPU for rendering performance and scales extremely well. If your motherboard can accept more than one video card, adding additional video cards will greatly improve Octane's rendering speed because Octane's performance scales perfectly with the number of GPUs (e.g. rendering with four GTX Titans will be 4x faster than using only 1 GTX Titan), without the need for SLI. The cards can be different models, allowing GPUs from two completely different architectures to be used in a machine with multiple PCI-E slots (such as a GTX 560 in the primary slot and a GTX 780 in the second). The cost of adding an additional Nvidia GPU to your system is very low compared to the cost of a small renderfarm of 10 to 15 computers to get the same performance with a CPU based rendering solution. Does Octane Render take advantage of SLI? No, but it can use multiple video cards for rendering (see above). It is also recommended to disable the SLI option in your Nvidia control panel to maximize Octane's rendering performance. Are you working for OTOY?!? Sounds like an advertisement to me... This is really VERY old news. Octane has multi GPU support since Beta 2.2 back in 2010 if i remember correctly. And the limitations are still the same for GPU rendering: the memory limitation of GPUs and problems/slow downs with complex algorithms. At least the first one could change drastically with the upcoming nvidia Maxwell architecture featuring unified memory. And Octane is still missing displacement - which could be related to the second problem i think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted April 1, 2014 Share Posted April 1, 2014 (edited) At least the first one could change drastically with the upcoming nvidia Maxwell architecture featuring unified memory. Well, this will be a CUDA v6 feature, officially named UVM (unified virtual memory) and will be a software solution that simplifies coding. Don't know how seamless of a transition it will be, and ofc I doubt it will "simply work" without devs adapting software for it...most of this capability is already available with CUDA 5, just more complicated for programmers to call. It won't be "dropping my 2GB 2nd gen Maxwell card to my 16GB RAM machine and have 2+whatever" available for most apps. Not even most CUDA apps. Not yet. The unified virtual memory "promise" is not what AMD tries to do with HSA, which is hardware based - but still requires tweaks to be used properly - according to PS4 game devs at least. Edited April 1, 2014 by dtolios Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lupaz Posted April 2, 2014 Author Share Posted April 2, 2014 lol no! I don't work for otoy. I just thought it could be interesting for non-experts because it's explained in a very simple way Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
branskyj Posted April 2, 2014 Share Posted April 2, 2014 Actually Octane is getting the 2.0 update in April and that will bring various things- displacement, motion blur, network rendering, hair and fur and some other delicious things... All of the rest is indeed old news- I am sure other GPU renders can offer the same capabilities. I myself use Octane at home (we use VRay only at work) and it is a very capable renderer indeed. Lets just see how the new Maxwell generation will perform and if not impressed I will be getting the Titan Z, muahahahahaha. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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