Hey folks,

did anybody hear something about future plans of giving mantra some GPU acceleration? I mean the Nvidia Pascal will be released next year. CPU rendering is more and more showing its age. Don't know if the houdini architecture would allow this modification?

Which GPU renderer are you using currently, and, how do you rate optimising CPU code?

I'm coming from a Cinema 4D backround and have played there with octane. It's a really nice speed increase. What do you mean by “how do you rate..”?

Most people asking for GPU rendering are of limited experience in seeing CPU optimisations, since you had mentioned CPU renderers are showing their age.

Well, there are many studios like Aixsponza which are migrating to octane and GPU accelerated rendering. So you don't agree that a physical based aproach renders faster on GPUs?

It's just a question of optimizing the szene to get the same speed?

Growth of the GPU renderers has no direct correlation to better performance as Arnold / Mantra and other CPU based renderers are growing too.

GPUs are RISC based co-processors; they have massive through-put and high latency. There will be some advantages but they are just another piece of the puzzle, lots of programming tricks are needed to make them work properly too.

Getting the most out of each one is a matter of understanding renderers, a skilled user can optimise the renderer.

But it's not me who has to do the programming tricks - I just want it to be fast When I see what kind of quality you can get with little time out of octane…I don't think that Maxwell (especially this one renders forever) or Arnold can do the same. I see GPU bases aproaches getting better and better…and well yes…in some cases a biased method and the irradiance cache are better for interiors etc. etc.

So why should I invest the time of optimizing for CPU when the gpu does the trick without that? I don't understand your point. The raw processing power of GPUs is massively higher, the vRam gets bigger and bigger (next year 32 GB on the Pascal cards). Until now I haven't hear anybody say that Octane doesn't renders faster as Arnold and other CPU based renderers. Of course you have to let it run on several GPUs when the szenes are getting bigger - but thats because of the little vram at the moment.

I'm quite new in the 3D scene, so of course I haven't got that much of experience and skills as if I would have worked for 15 years in the field.

Nice reel by the way!

My english must be supergreat ..

In my brief testing GPU renderers do seem to be good at direct light and ambient occlusion passes, so simple stuff; displacements, volumes and indirect light look to the be the main bottlenecks.

Hopefully will have time to be run more tests soon.

BTW Octane is coming to Houdini soon, though you need the full commercial license, not Indie.

Well, I know that - thats why I asked if they plan to do that with Mantra By the way, I love Mantra. The level of control I didn't have before. But more speed is always nice. At the moment I use Hou for 2 months or so. don't want to invest 4500€ tooo early..

At C4D displ. mapping was a problem too when using octane in version 1. but they do manage it quite good now. not as much precice control as for example in vray, but it works good. I think they will implement openvdb support for version 3.0., so volumes should get a little boost. Time will tell.

https://vimeo.com/129051743 [vimeo.com]

This was purely done in C4D + Octane - without big GPU setup.

I am pretty sure that Redshift is developing their awesome renderer for Houdini I use it for Maya all the time and it is wickedly fast and noiseless.

https://www.redshift3d.com [redshift3d.com]

Dang,

RedShift has a closed scene description so there is no way to write an external exporter.

Arnold and Renderman both have open scene descriptions for end users who want/need to tweak values before rendering.

Hi , How to use more VRAM Gpu in sim or rendering with mantra render ?!
My sys :
intel i7 8700
ram 32
GPU : MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X