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Does anyone use Tesla with Houdini here?


magneto

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I saw this video recently and was wondering if anyone use tesla with Houdini?

If so, does it make it significantly faster as shown in the video?

Do you need to have Quadro for Tesla to be utilized optimally?

What are your experiences with it? :)

Edited by magneto
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When the teaser for H12 was out, in one of the videos (I think was in the pyro 2.0), they said they was using tesla... but I don't know the difference from the quadro line.

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That's what I was thinking. If it's all from tesla, most people wouldn't be excited because I doubt a lot of people have one :)

The tesla is pretty much the same as a quadro but the main difference as far as I know they don't have a display port on them. So they are strictly a gpu. A quadro does this plus runs your monitors. I am running a quadro 6000 but I have not had a chance to play too much with H12. I did do a couple of the shelf auto setups and turned on the "open cl" checkbox but I m not sure if this is the way you tell H12 to use the gpu. It ran faster but it also crashed out the sims a lot.

I am pretty sure I am doing it wrong, but just some thoughts.

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In terms of raw processing power the Tesla cards are similar to the Quadro cards. The difference is the Tesla cards have drivers that are optimized for general purpose computing (instead of graphics like OpenGL and DirectX). Like already mentioned the Tesla cards don't have any display outputs. For similar performance and memory size the Tesla is substantially less expensive than a Quadro. That makes the Tesla ideal for a render node or for a workstation that needs multiple compute devices. The Tesla is a stand alone product and doesn't need a Quadro to function.

Gaming cards are a good way to get a lot of performance on the cheap but they have less memory which means simulations with fewer voxels and objects in Houdini. Also check out the FireStream products from AMD as they serve the same purpose as the Tesla cards and will work with Houdini since it uses OpenCL instead of CUDA. The numbers to look at are the double precision performance (and the memory size).

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Thanks guys.

@luke, thanks for the info. So Tesla wouldn't speed up Houdini much? Also FireStream card, how much speed increase would you estimate? They are not in the order of 100s, right?

That all depends on the hardware being used and the features of Houdini being used. Can't say what difference there will be without knowing the current situation.

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Thanks guys.

@luke, thanks for the info. So Tesla wouldn't speed up Houdini much? Also FireStream card, how much speed increase would you estimate? They are not in the order of 100s, right?

Based on my experience with using quadros is that it is definately noticeable, but it's not revolutionary. However, compared to h11, pyro sims are noticeably faster overall, due to some optimizations. The real problem is the limited amount of vram you have at your disposal. I'm guessing tesla negates this problem though.

I generally start with opencl to get a feel for how the sim will move, but when I want to cache an actual sim, I up the res a bit, and turn opencl off.

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Based on my experience with using quadros is that it is definately noticeable, but it's not revolutionary. However, compared to h11, pyro sims are noticeably faster overall, due to some optimizations. The real problem is the limited amount of vram you have at your disposal. I'm guessing tesla negates this problem though.

I generally start with opencl to get a feel for how the sim will move, but when I want to cache an actual sim, I up the res a bit, and turn opencl off.

Pyro Solver in 12 has a large number of shaping tools which aren't optimized for GPU computing, really the Smoke solver sees the greatest increase in performance from using the GPU

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