topic Re: Arnold GPU? in Maya Forum

Arnold GPU?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 07:55:43 GMT

Where is it and why / how did it not get released with Maya 2019..?

Re: Arnold GPU?

Christoph_Schaedl — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 08:25:33 GMT

If you register here you are able to see the recorded Session.

Some good infos about the state of ArnoldGPU

https://info.nvidia.com/the-future-of-rendering-webinar-reg-page.html

Re: Arnold GPU?

Christoph_Schaedl — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 08:26:42 GMT

And here the slides.

https://ssl.lvl3.on24.com/event/18/87/44/2/rt/1/documents/resourceList1545423938364/nvidiathefutureofrenderingwebinarpresentationrealfinal1545423973982.pdf

Re: Arnold GPU?

mspeer — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:38:40 GMT

Hi!

Why should Arnold support GPU? I know it's under research and development, but for what do you need it, what sort of projects do you do?

GPU is not better than CPU, it just different.

Re: Arnold GPU?

rimcrazy — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:51:55 GMT

Why support GPU? You are kidding right?.... I use Vray not Arnold for my render engine with Maya. My last job my customer wanted everything in 4k.... I'm talking 4096x2650. To CPU render my scene took over and hour per frame using CPU rendering. My workstation has 2xGTX1080 cards in it. To GPU render was less than 3 minutes per frame. GPU rendering is light years faster than CPU rendering. That is why people want to use it. On 1 GTX1080 you have 2560 cores. 2 cards I have 5120 cores vs 4 cores in my Skylake CPU. Now there is a difference. In Vray (and I suspect for Arnold but I've not looked in detail at their implementation) not ALL materials and material effects can be rendered in GPU because some effects required more advance math requirements only found in the CPU not the GPU. If your scene requires those effects/materials then yes you must use CPU rendering but if your scene is fine with the limitations and you have a GPU render engine then your throughput is significantly faster. This is why Redshift and Octane exist.

While I like Arnold for its simplicity. As a Maya instructor it is truly the best for students because they can get quick results and easily see how changing material properties changes the render in a very fast feedback. That being said we all know Arnold is designed to work as it's name-sake. It is brute force, and a high quality render is slower than molasses. I'd love to see GPU rendering for Arnold as it would lift its largest restriction.

Re: Arnold GPU?

mspeer — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 14:37:58 GMT

"Why support GPU? You are kidding right?"

- No.

"GPU rendering is light years faster than CPU rendering."

- No, not in general.

"5120 cores vs 4 cores"

- You can't compare it this way (only).

"because some effects required more advance math requirements only found in the CPU not the GPU"

- That's one of multiple factors that have to be looked at when doing a comparison.

GPU has a big advantage for parallel computations, no doubt, but there are also limitations.

Also some already existing CPU features that even may become part of consumer CPUs (maybe for the next generation) can speed up CPU rendering a lot if supported (/optimized) by the renderer.

I will stop here, because i don't want to become this discussion too technical.

If GPU would be better in any case no CPU renderer would exist anymore, and there are still some renderer developed for CPU only for a good reason.

All features (pros/cons) are listed at the respective renderer sites, so i don't need to write this here again.

I can only recommend for everyone to do a more in-depth research and read the pros and cons before making a decision about a certain technology or renderer.

Re: Arnold GPU?

dgorsman — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:13:34 GMT

The thing is, you're more likely to see the average user with a 6-8 core hyperthreaded processor than multiple GPUs, and would likely see more benefit in general from multiple cores than multiple GPUs. Plus each GPU has to have sufficient VRAM to render the entire scene. So for the cost of several GTX-1080Ti/Titan/etc. it would be possible to get a decently fast processor with 12+ cores and sufficient RAM that would satisfy most needs.

Not to mention, server farm or distributed desktop rendering is more likely to have large numbers of CPU cores available vs. GPUs (grid or otherwise).

Re: Arnold GPU?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 22:26:39 GMT

its probably because this isn’t controlled by Autodesk this is being developed by nvidia so relay your question to their forum

Re: Arnold GPU?

mspeer — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 22:36:53 GMT

Hi!

@Anonymous That looks like a mistake.

Arnold is developed by Autodesk / Solid Angle, but not by NVIDIA.

Re: Arnold GPU?

Stephen.Blair — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 22:49:36 GMT

@mspeer wrote:

Hi!

@Anonymous That looks like a mistake.

Arnold is developed by Autodesk / Solid Angle, but not by NVIDIA.

Right, Arnold GPU is developed by the Arnold team at Solid Angle/Autodesk.

Arnold GPU uses NVIDIA Optix

Re: Arnold GPU?

arcon76 — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 01:41:29 GMT

FYI the scene fitting in a single GPU's memory is no longer a limitation with the 2080 & above series of nVidia cards, which can stack memory with nvlink. That's a pretty huge deal.
I'm not sure what your basing the multiple cores Vs multiple GPUs theory on - that's entirely dependent on the renderer and the scene. Its totally misleading to imply that a single high spec multi-threaded CPU will outperform a dual GPU system most of the time, or even some of the time... generally you need at least a dual CPU system (or 2 nodes) for that, which is much more expensive. If that wasn't the case then GPU rendering wouldn't have exploded like it has, and companies wouldn't all be developing it.
That being said CPU support certainly isn't going anywhere anytime soon, especially not while the larger studios built up infrastructure around it over the years and its fulfilling their needs.

Re: Arnold GPU?

Christoph_Schaedl — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 06:17:59 GMT

little teaser.

https://youtu.be/Ni35SEZTSMM

Re: Arnold GPU?

codycooke01 — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 20:33:06 GMT

Apologies, but for freelancers, GPU is leagues better. For one simple fact speed. I just had a shot earlier this week that I would have had to send to a farm in order to have Arnold render it. I remade my shaders and lighting in Redshift and rendered the shot myself. It was done in 6 hours on a single Titan Xp. No cost out of pocket to send it to a farm. I have also had numerous issues with farms not correctly reading cache files, plugins, or shader networks. Rendering locally is far superior for freelancers like myself. That being said Arnold does have a nicer look to my eyes so I am eagerly awaiting the GPU launch, and hopefully better licensing system.

Re: Arnold GPU?

mspeer — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 21:33:45 GMT

Hi!

"...for freelancers, GPU is leagues better. For one simple fact speed."

- GPU is not better or faster than CPU in general. Just read my post above.

"Rendering locally is far superior for freelancers like myself."

- I totally support this statement.

"Arnold does have a nicer look to my eyes"

- Maybe more render time is needed to get this ("nicer") result. (That's just one of many points to consider when doing comparisons)

Re: Arnold GPU?

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 21:41:55 GMT

Just a heads up for those who thought they were gonna get quicker render times out of the box with Arnold 5.3...
It is indeed very much faster... same frame took 2:41 in GPU opposed to around 30min with CPU.

BUT

The quality of the GPU render was very much below that of the CPU render. I don't know if you have to change any settings or what it is, but water fx. will render with noise in GPU and none in CPU. Also handles specs worse than CPU.

And for some reason it fills tight spaces with light. I have this mattress on a wooden base and in the CPU render the crach between mattress and base is properly darkened as it would be. In GPU the same crack gets globally illuminated or something.

This is without changing any render settings at all between CPU and GPU. So looking forward to an in detail tutorial to how you set up the render for GPU or that it comes out of beta 😄 as of now, the use of Arnold GPU is very good for quick test renders, but you still have to go through the mill for the final render.

Real time viewport wasn't too good on my poor ol 980ti. I would say the CPU real time was slightly better because it would respond faster in terms of composition.

But... looking forward to seeing the progress.

Re: Arnold GPU?

Stephen.Blair — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 22:24:07 GMT

GPU uses AA sampling only, so keeping the same settings isn't the way to go.

With GPU, you should use adaptive sampling if you're trying to match noise between CPU and GPU.

We put some guidelines here: https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/x/i4QsBQ

The "filling tight spaces with light" could be a precision issue. We're still working on precision fixes for the GPU

@Anonymous wrote:

Just a heads up for those who thought they were gonna get quicker render times out of the box with Arnold 5.3...
It is indeed very much faster... same frame took 2:41 in GPU opposed to around 30min with CPU.

BUT

The quality of the GPU render was very much below that of the CPU render. I don't know if you have to change any settings or what it is, but water fx. will render with noise in GPU and none in CPU. Also handles specs worse than CPU.

And for some reason it fills tight spaces with light. I have this mattress on a wooden base and in the CPU render the crach between mattress and base is properly darkened as it would be. In GPU the same crack gets globally illuminated or something.

This is without changing any render settings at all between CPU and GPU. So looking forward to an in detail tutorial to how you set up the render for GPU or that it comes out of beta 😄 as of now, the use of Arnold GPU is very good for quick test renders, but you still have to go through the mill for the final render.

Real time viewport wasn't too good on my poor ol 980ti. I would say the CPU real time was slightly better because it would respond faster in terms of composition.

But... looking forward to seeing the progress.

Re: Arnold GPU?

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 08:38:41 GMT

Hi Stephen..

That was very helpful. I followed the instructions and it improved the render. Pretty much as good as the CPU render, but ofcourse upping the samples took a hit on time. Ended up with 20:31 for the same frame as opposed to 41 with CPU.

I noticed I had displacement turned on for an object that didn't need it, but what is interesting about that is that the CPU and GPU renders the same displacement differently. The Gpu one is thicker. This was a simple bevelled cube with a wood shader. Just thought you might want to know.

But in all fairness, 21 is a lot better than 41, so good work so far! 🙂 Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with!

Re: Arnold GPU?

mspeer — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:48:23 GMT

Hi!

@Anonymous

Thanks for adding your results, but please also add the model number and specs of CPU and GPU when doing this, otherwise the results are useless for other users.

(For example a 300 Watt GPU rendering faster than a 100 Watt CPU should not be a big surprise.)

Re: Arnold GPU?

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 08:22:17 GMT

Sorry indeed.

This is with the i7 5930k 3.5Ghz OC'ed to 4.4Ghz

and the 980ti.

Also a shout out to Arvid Schneider who posted a video a couple of days ago where he demos the Arnold GPU viewport and flow. Made my viewport a bit more pleasurable 🙂 I'd say that the modelling part in viewport has gotten very responsive and very much adds to Arnold what has been interesting about Vrays ipr. Except I find your shader flow easier to understand and work with.

Side question: Would the GPU renderer accept dual gfx? Say fx two rtx 2080 cards? And thereby roughly double the speed?
EDIT: Ah, found the answer right here 🙂
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Getting+Started+with+Arnold+GPU

Re: Arnold GPU?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 06:50:31 GMT

A little more update... First of all for those of you considering upgrading your GPU, and maybe you looked at the 2080ti but there are too many biased threads against and too many biased for it. Ofcourse AMD is on the way with something exciting, but that isn't out yet.
I bit the bullet and upgraded to the 2080ti from the 980ti yesterday and at the same time tried maya 2019. But it wasnt hazzle free.... not so much because of GPU itself, but I didn't check the form factor before ordering it ;D thankfully I was able to fit it in my R5 cabinett after removing one of the drive docks in the bottom. It will only just fit and I had to invent a custom support because the one that came with it wouldn't fit because of the psu xD Just so you know.... remember to check if it will fit in your setup.

Anyways, after updating bios, and fiddling with connections (I couldn't get a signal... Either it now works because I connected both the DVI to HDMI and the display port, or it was because the card really does need all three power connectors instead of two... which was a split.), I have it up and running. And man... it's quite different from the 980ti.

A 2x2k render with 3.5gb worth of textures, 3 area lights and 6 emissive objects (NO environment) took 4m50s in the final render. This was obviously after having done the first pixel render. The view port is very responsive and I only had a few errors which I couldn't work out why they happened since I couldn't replicate them, but it might be due to having too many programs open at once? Was running Subs P, Photoshop and Maya at the same time and got an insufficient memory error once. Although I don't know why that would be since the GPU has 11gb on it.

Anyways, I definitely feel like upgrading to a newer GPU made a difference not only in speed but also smoothness.

I'll have to try one of my previous projects to get a comparison in effeciency, but for now it looks promising. And as far as I understood Arnold GPU isn't even using RTX yet? But that would probably only affect scene with high amount of environment and specularity?