Should I believe in the GPU rendering hype?

[curly]

Hi,

I've been watching forum posts and looking everything up over GPU rendering.

My humble conclusions are:

1. Yes, GPU rendering is fast for simple scenes.

2. GPU's don't scale well. Your speed benefit drops when adding more then 3 GPU's.

3. You can't add up the gpu memory of all your cards, so your limited to 4, 6, 8, 12 GB memory.

With inexpensive SSD's in mind, cpu rendering gives you more flexibility. 

4. A GPU rendering solution isn't exactly cheaper then a cpu solution. If you count the price of the graphics cards, a special motherboard, the powe rsupply, it's as expensive as buying a decent Intel Xeon workstation.

And you get more flexibility with cpu rendering and the cpu has a lower power consumption.

 

My conclusion for the moment, I don't believe in the GPU hype, it's good for simpeler scenes, but once you take it further cpu rendering gives you more flexibility.

 

Comments please,

 

 

[Guest tar]

If you can get your work onto a GPU it can run significantly faster, the caveat being that in some situations don't believe the hype

[angelous4x]

I freelance from Home, and using Redshift. and i really love working in redshift. easy and fast. but i do have a titan installed. my vimeo page has some samples of rs renders in softimage and Houdini.

[curly]

I don't have Redshift3D, but looked at it. Perhaps someone can post more videos with rendertimes etc.... An overview video  on the plugin in Houdini. There aren't a lot of videos over the Houdini plugin. Thanks for the replies. I had Octane Render for Lightwave and thought it was fast. More videos on the gpu stuff please.

[bonsak]

Redshift demo can be downloaded here: https://www.redshift3d.com/demo

-b

[Kardonn]

From my experience so far, the GPU rendering feels like a bit of a fool's paradise sometimes. You see an image very fast, it's impressive, but once you actually dial up the settings to produce images that hold up in animations...you're often not much ahead of the game compared to CPU rendering in Arnold...especially in the unbiased tracers like Octane. Compared to CPU rendering in Mantra though, it's not even a close comparison, Mantra will get destroyed by any GPU renderer as long as you're happy to deal with any limitations and losing some of Mantra's flexibility and access to Hou's data.

The best thing that RedShift has going for it though is the fact that it does irradiance caching of many different varieties. That makes it I think the only renderer available to Houdini that will let you render interior scenes with any kind of reasonable time per frame.

I'm a big fan of HtoA for everything else, it's incredibly fast, the image shading quality looks fantastic, the feature set is great, and the SSS and hair models are excellent.

I used to do everything with Mantra and after literally my first day diving into HtoA I never looked back. I always assumed Mantra was a bit on the slow side, and that I'd get maybe 25-30% faster renders with Arnold. I couldn't have been more wrong, sometimes it's nearly an order of magnitude faster and with fewer random issues/bugs.