Time for GPU?

[Chris MacDonald]

Hey guys/girls,

 

Have just been thinking that we're overdue a render-node (or workstation) and thought it prudent to look into whether it is worthwhile going down the GPU route these days.

 

Obviously GPU is considerably faster, so I don't need anyone giving me the hard-sell on that; the thing that concerns me most is RAM/VRAM.

 

I know that only a year or so ago the max that GPU's could accommodate was 24Gb (not enough!) even if you had multiple cards, though I've been looking into the new NVidia RTX and from what I gather they seem to be able to share VRam via NVlink?

 

Can anyone confirm whether this is/isn't the case, or if any of you have actually tried to create a rig with 2+ of the RTX cards? Does it work with VRay?

 

Ultimately we need to be able to render scenes that use of 64Gb+ of RAM/VRam.

 

Kind regards,

Chris

Edited December 13, 2018 by Macker

[rsuleyman]

I've been using Octane with C4D for several years now. I'm only using a 6GB GTX Titan Black but I've been able to render some very heavy scenes. You certainly have to manage your scene well and use proxies/instances wherever you can. The latest release of Octane can now use the system RAM for textures and geometry with a slight decrease in render speed.

 

 

I haven't really used VRay RT though so can't say anything about that, but I do know that it supports hybrid rendering on both the GPU and CPU. I don't know if that is still limited by the VRAM though.

[Marti Zanden]

I've been using Fstorm for the past year and I'm loving every minute of it. Before I used Mental Ray with Maya and that was a Nightmare compared to this.

 

I'm howerver doing simple interiors and studio scenes that aren't that heavy so I have never had any issues with memory. But on the Fstorm Facebook page I've seen some big scenes with lots of buildings and vegetation being rendered with no problem. It's all about scene management and Fstorm has bitmaps compression that can bring the memory consumption down considerably without loss of quality (so I have been told). But I am not the right person to give you the best advise on these heavy scenes as I don't do them.

 

As far as I know Fstorm still can't (and won't be for the near future) use the NVLink Vram stacking in the new RTX cards. But I believe Vray is able to do this or will be in the near future but I don't know for sure so don't trust me on that.

Edited December 18, 2018 by martizanden

[James Vella]

I have a close eye on fstorm aswell, the archviz renders look absolutely stunning!