Will Arnold GPU support external GPU?

[reyesr.ph]

Im a 3D character moder. I have a tower and just bought a Razer Blade 2018 with GTX 1070. I'm want minimize my workspace. Obviously the laptop has a great advantage of being mobile so if possible i want to use it as much as possible. But to replace my tower, (Ryzen 1700x, 1080 TI) I would need an external GPU set up. I would still love to render with Arnold but since the Razer Blade only has 8750 UH Cpu, I don't expect to use that with Arnold. So I'm hoping that Arnold GPU will able me to still use Arnold and still render really fast with external GPU. And will this feature come to MtoA also?

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

Yeah, e-GPUs work.

Unless you're on macOS, where we don't support the GPU.

[richardreyes3d]

Wow awesome news!

Will it be plug and play where Arnold will just chose the egpu when plugged?

[Anonymous]

oh really on which version

[Stephen.Blair]

internal, work-in-progress builds of an unreleased product

[rico]

Why don't you support the GPU on Mac? Only in the beginning or is it time to switch to another renderer? I love Arnold but I would not switch to windows to use it.

[Stephen.Blair]

Because we use nvidia technology for the GPU

[vladtofan]

How about AMD gpus ?

[Stephen.Blair]

No. Arnold GPU is using NVidia Optix

[reyesr.ph]

This is incredible news!

Have you found any performance loss compared to a similar Desktop GPU? I've read there was around a 10-15% performance loss in general when it comes to eGPUs.

[joostkonemann]

Current Macs indeed only ship with AMD GPUs, but in principal a Nvidia GPU could be used with eGPU (what I read the drivers are still questionable, but still...). Would Arnold GPU work in that case on macOS?

And hopefully Apple releases a new Mac Pro next year in which Nvidia GPUs can be used, so hopefully Mac is not completely ruled out from GPU rendering...

[rico]

I also hope that a nvidia eGPU would work with the Mac. A non proprietary Solution for GPU rendering would be much more better than CUDA-only for many users.

[maxtarpini]

Well considering that it looks like Apple dropped support for Nvidia cards with latest Mojave .. I think that looking to use your Mac for GPU rendering with Arnold doesn't make sense nowadays.

[rico]

Wouldn’t it be possible to develop a gpu tenderer who uses OpenCL instead of proprietary CUDA solutions. I did some tests with prorender. It’s to slow at the moment but maybe a solution for the future. Works with AMD and NVidia.

[Anonymous]

Do you have any plans to support GPU on Mac in the future?

[Stephen.Blair]

We are using NVidia Optix, so when macs have nvidia cards...

[Anonymous]

What about macs that happen to have NVIDIA cards? *Ahem* A couple 1080Ti's that happened to slip in there... somehow... Will there be a flag in the SDK to enable this even on mac?

I'm on High Sierra and am getting CUDA support from NVIDIA's web drivers, also have optix version 5.0.1: https://developer.nvidia.com/designworks/optix/downloads/legacy

[Stephen.Blair]

We're using the latest Optix. Until NVidia drivers and Optix are available for macOS, there won't be an Arnold GPU version for macOS

[RGhost77]

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/01/08/autodesk-red-3d-animation-6k-video-editing-laptops/?f%3Fsrc...

According this article no words about support for non RTX cards...

So what would be interesting what minimum NVIDIA cards supported in Arnold... i guess it will be known only after release.