GPGPU (OpenCL) rendering for Fusion 360

[O.Tan]

Hi,

So just did some rendering and pretty much confirmed that right now F360 only makes use of CPU during rendering. Though this is not forcing F360 team to implement OpenCL rendering, but I'm curious why is it till today, very few renderers make use of the GPU as well?

I know Octane uses CUDA, V-Ray uses OpenCL and they're some more GPU based renderer, but we're near 2015 and the number of GPGPU based renderer is really low. So what seem to be the reason why developers are not making use of OpenCL (preferred as it's non tied to Nvidia cards only) or CUDA? 

I've used softwares like FinalCutProX and CaptureOnePro 8 which makes use of OpenCL and the speed improvements is really noticeable. 

Just a general discussion.

[Anonymous]

I am glad to hear about these future improvements and I am really looking forward to them, as I am a little bit frustrated at the time with the rendering performance. I have a 12 core 24 thread Xeon v3 and it still takes a considerable amount of time to render, even at only 1920x1080. It's worth noting that the performance scaling is very close to if not the full 100% in a virtual machine environment when it comes to CPU rendering(the same is not true for the viewport that suffers from the low video memory available in non-gpu-passthrough virtualized desktops). Thus it's a good option to take advantage of the cloud features and start a rendering que in a virtual machine and still have enough CPU resources left to continue working through the main OS (I also like the fact that fusion CAN use 100% of all the available CPU cores). In conclusion the argument of predictable scaling with CPU rendering is valid and well backed up by the resulting performance in different use cases(a 2 core macbook, a 12 thread VM up to a 24 thread workstation).