Indigo Renderer Forum

dag wrote:i7 860: 900k s/s
+ HD5770: 1,6M s/s

800MB ram reported. Using catalyst 11.6 or something, I don't know. Drivers are messed up. Only drivers from windows update works. Shocking!? AMD drivers suck.

With what scene ?

I don't see that level of performance increase on my i7 iMac which has somewhat similar hardware specs (i7 870 + HD5750).
The only scene where I see OpenCL GPU supported performance (quite drastic too) increase is the Caterpillar scene. For all other (test) scenes PT GPU+CPU is slower than CPU-only.

I see a Windows based render slave with NVIDIA hardware in my near future.

Headroom wrote:I see a Windows based render slave with NVIDIA hardware in my near future.

Still beta station of version v3..... maybe there are some issues with the build or with your oooooold GPU drivers...
One of both is more likely ;)

Zom-B wrote:

Headroom wrote:I see a Windows based render slave with NVIDIA hardware in my near future.

Still beta station of version v3..... maybe there are some issues with the build or with your oooooold GPU drivers...
One of both is more likely ;)

True. However, having an iMac with a mobile (i7 870; ATI Radeon 5750M) GPU comes with a few limitations. I already am on 10.6.8 and if there's something newer out there in terms of OpenCL drivers it may improve the performance by a few percentage points provided I'd be able to track such things down and knew how to install them.
However, the fact remains it's still a mobile GPU and will never really rock the boat. Also doing anything else while rendering with Indigo in GPU mode is so far pretty choppy!

Even if I upgrade to the newest i7 iMac that features a i2600 CPU and an ATI HD 6970M I guess I would be about $500 - $700 out of pocket if I sold this iMac (i7 870) and it would be not as much bang for the buck as if I add a dedicated render node with say a ATI 470 and a i2600 board/processor. Also I'd have much quicker access to latest graphics card drivers and better upgrade opportunities for the future.

Neat thing is that with my Indigo 100 license I still have two unused node licenses ;-)

After this update i just get an error when i use GPU acceleration.

GPU: NVIDIA 8600 GS

Headroom wrote:

dag wrote: I see a Windows based render slave with NVIDIA hardware in my near future.

Hi Headroom. For now Indigo 3.0.x has problems with mixed net rendering machines (OSX - Windows). The problem arises with the use of scenes with textures, the slave machines can´t locate the path where textures are stored (a matter of directory path slashes, "\" vs "/"?)
In Indigo 2.6.1 the mixed OS´s net rendering machines works well, so I´m sure its a minor bug, I hope Glare team will iron out in future Indigo releases.

Just to explain some of the innovations in network rendering for Indigo 3 that was done and maybe still generate some issues:

v2 always packed the whole scene and send it to the slave, where the the whole scene gets extracted in a folder to be used (master scene zip stayed in the cache folder too!).
A lot of network traffic and HDD space was spent here, since changing a single bump value of a texture needed a whole new full package to be transfered!

v3 now transfers the files separately and indexes them. Your 250MB HDRI map only gets transfered once and reused, same for the meshes etc.
Changing the bump value in v3 only transfers the changed igs file, and also a new different scene using "old" and already transfered textures don't need to send that files anymore to the slave.

Using Internet based network rendering this enhancements are a blessing!
Now only the size of transfered IGI files from slave to master need to shrink ;)

@ Zom-B thanks for the info. I had not read about that before here on the forum.
@juan_irender Good to know and I appreciate the concern! When I said near future that meant within the next 6 months and experience tells me that the fine folks at glare usually iron those things out pretty quickly.

Headroom wrote:

dag wrote:i7 860: 900k s/s
+ HD5770: 1,6M s/s

800MB ram reported. Using catalyst 11.6 or something, I don't know. Drivers are messed up. Only drivers from windows update works. Shocking!? AMD drivers suck.

With what scene ?

I don't see that level of performance increase on my i7 iMac which has somewhat similar hardware specs (i7 870 + HD5750).
The only scene where I see OpenCL GPU supported performance (quite drastic too) increase is the Caterpillar scene. For all other (test) scenes PT GPU+CPU is slower than CPU-only.

I see a Windows based render slave with NVIDIA hardware in my near future.

Same here. Caterpillar CPU 40k s/s, CPU+GPU 20 times faster, but decreases steadily.

..could be possible to add the ALPHA RENDER method in the GUI?

..and I also suggest a check indicating which tool is currently enabled, whether the selection or pan tool.
Also, a small clear icon on the status bar could help :)

Thanks guys!

Indigo locks up with threads set to 3, 5, 6, 7 or 9+, when gpu enabled.
i7 with ht enabled and hd5770.

dag wrote:Indigo locks up with threads set to 3, 5, 6, 7 or 9+, when gpu enabled.
i7 with ht enabled and hd5770.

Just tested this now, cannot reproduce on my i7 + GeForce GTX 470 (using both CUDA and OpenCL modes with 3 threads).

I just noticed an interesting thing - I had an object in my scene with a phong (nk) material and displacement using an image texture (.tif image). I started the render and then, inside Indigo, I selected that material and switched it from phong to null. when the render re-loaded the object was invisible, but it still cast the shadow of the displaced object. when I deleted the image file path for the displacement, the render reloaded and the shadow disappeared. not sure if this is necessarily a bug, could be potentially useful for someone (maybe?)

wow (:

There's probably a bug beneath, but if that's true then you can render the image with and without the shadows and substract them afterwards in order to get a sort of a shadow pass. I think. Weird ^^

edit: ah no I get it, the shadow comes from path tracing having bad time with null. Scattering schmilblick... iirc d:

lycium wrote:

dag wrote:Indigo locks up with threads set to 3, 5, 6, 7 or 9+, when gpu enabled.
i7 with ht enabled and hd5770.

Just tested this now, cannot reproduce on my i7 + GeForce GTX 470 (using both CUDA and OpenCL modes with 3 threads).

When I use 3 threads, 1 thread terminates in the log, then nothing happens, and Indigo process stays open in task manager after closing. With 7 threads, 3 threads terminates.

Caterpillar scene and the milk test scene is 30 times faster with CPU on 2.6, and also scattering doesn't seem to render correctly. Choc milk is whiteish.

More AMDfail?

The nVidia update application tells me my drivers are up to date. Yet my GTX 550 Ti is not recognized even though it's a more recent model than the 9800 GT I used to have, which Indigo did recognize back then. Thoughts?