video cards and active shade, iray/vray realtime

[SgWRX]

hello. so i'm starting to think that active shade would really help in my workflow when working with designers. typically they'll want to see materials, have me tweak colors and things. aside from my own tweaking. i think active shade rendering in 3ds Max would help speed things up.

 

i had a problem in 2014 Max, with crashes and such. 2015 seems a little better in that regard as long as i don't use the video card as a hardware resource! or, set the active shade renderer to a limited number of passes or time interval. this is specific to iRay, but i imagine it's similar in vray?

 

the new nvidia quadro Kx200 cards are about double the old ones, ie) double the memory, double the # of cuda cores etc.

 

as a side note, i learned that Max iray 2016 is optimized for the kepler architecture whereas 2014 and 2015 were not optimized for kepler. 2016 then, gives increased performance using the current K4000 card that i have.

 

anyway, my question is, how many of you use active shade and what type of performance have you seen vs. the different types of cards - say going from the K4000 to a K4200 or 2000 to 2200 or 5000 to 5200?

 

i'm trying to find a balance between time saved by showing various designers what a material or color would be, even if the active shade view is not a full beautiful grain free render.

 

thanks!

[deadkaiser]

I don't think there are many comparison reviews out there which actually compare the card let alone ones that will give you a comparison for Vray RT or Iray performance.... awhile ago admittedly I did some looking around for comparisons of GTX cards to Quadro and i could not find any decent comparison.....(maybe i just missed them)

[SgWRX]

for some exterior views, thw cpu iray active shade works ok, that is with trees and grass et turned off. i am very curious to see whay happenz when i get 2016 installed given nvidias comments.

 

i wish there were a way to utilize cpus across the network, maybe there is but havent found yet. i

 

im tempted to put in a request for two k4200 or one 5200. i say that realizing that unless u set a max # of passes or max time for iray active shade, youll most likely lock up just 1 video card with heavy geometry.