Indigo Renderer Forum

It's been nice to get to the position where Nick can work on the core and the rest of us can work on the less technical aspects of Indigo. Thanks for your support Indigo lifetime customers. And enjoy being in the majority on this forum, since at this rate you won't be in the majority for much longer.

any chance to get sun + hdr(sky) to work together...I already talked about it in the todo list for future indigo and for me it's a very important feature for exterior renderings... I've to admit it's one of the first thing that make me hesitate to take a indigo licence. Of course way you are going is also mostly important (GPU, floating licence etc..) but my demand is certainly much easier to create no ?

archigrafix wrote:any chance to get sun + hdr(sky) to work together...I already talked about it in the todo list for future indigo and for me it's a very important feature for exterior renderings... I've to admit it's one of the first thing that make me hesitate to take a indigo licence. Of course way you are going is also mostly important (GPU, floating licence etc..) but my demand is certainly much easier to create no ?

Yup, I will try and work on this relatively soon.

OnoSendai wrote: Yup, I will try and work on this relatively soon.

Juheeeeeh! can´t wait.

Ono, Ben,

I hate to bug but I have to make a hardware decision very soon as to whether or not to invest in a quality graphics card (such as the GTX 295 or perhaps an ATI one).

Can you shed any light on what the plan is for GPU acceleration in Indigo in terms of whether or not it uses OpenCL, what kind of hardware will get the most kick out of it, whether the graphics card RAM will be an issue/barrier and possibly a ballpark timeline?

It would be important so that I don't go and buy a 295 only to find that I should've gone with a 275 with more RAM or something like that, and it stands in the way of deciding whether or not to upgrade my CPU or invest in a graphics card.

Any tips would be awesome!

Thanks.

StompinTom wrote:Ono, Ben,

I hate to bug but I have to make a hardware decision very soon as to whether or not to invest in a quality graphics card (such as the GTX 295 or perhaps an ATI one).

Can you shed any light on what the plan is for GPU acceleration in Indigo in terms of whether or not it uses OpenCL, what kind of hardware will get the most kick out of it, whether the graphics card RAM will be an issue/barrier and possibly a ballpark timeline?

It would be important so that I don't go and buy a 295 only to find that I should've gone with a 275 with more RAM or something like that, and it stands in the way of deciding whether or not to upgrade my CPU or invest in a graphics card.

Any tips would be awesome!

Thanks.

If you're projects are consuming more memory you should go the 275 as you can have more memory available at a more reasonable price, 295 is like having two separate boards, each with their own memory...

pixie wrote:

StompinTom wrote:Ono, Ben,

I hate to bug but I have to make a hardware decision very soon as to whether or not to invest in a quality graphics card (such as the GTX 295 or perhaps an ATI one).

Can you shed any light on what the plan is for GPU acceleration in Indigo in terms of whether or not it uses OpenCL, what kind of hardware will get the most kick out of it, whether the graphics card RAM will be an issue/barrier and possibly a ballpark timeline?

It would be important so that I don't go and buy a 295 only to find that I should've gone with a 275 with more RAM or something like that, and it stands in the way of deciding whether or not to upgrade my CPU or invest in a graphics card.

Any tips would be awesome!

Thanks.

If you're projects are consuming more memory you should go the 275 as you can have more memory available at a more reasonable price, 295 is like having two separate boards, each with their own memory...

That's why I'm wondering if all the scene information will be stored on the card, or just part of it. If there is a method with which the scene doesn't get stored on the GPU, then I'd opt for the 295 as that would be more beneficial in terms of speed and power, as far as I understand. Since I usually work in larger resolutions and with hi rez textures, I would probably be able to choke the graphics card RAM pretty quickly.

My understanding is that the scene needs to be stored in the GPU ram to get any reasonable speed advantage from using the GPU, so that would suggest the 275 with its greater memory.

When indigo gains gpu support, does this mean that your cpu will be freed up? When I am running indigo, often times other tasks become very slow..

neo0. wrote:When indigo gains gpu support, does this mean that your cpu will be freed up? When I am running indigo, often times other tasks become very slow..

I hope both get used, and then some... =D

pixie wrote:

neo0. wrote:When indigo gains gpu support, does this mean that your cpu will be freed up? When I am running indigo, often times other tasks become very slow..

I hope both get used, and then some... =D

I don't think that's possible.

So yes Neo, as far as I know the CPU does not take any load in GPU rendering.

Godzilla wrote:

pixie wrote:

neo0. wrote:When indigo gains gpu support, does this mean that your cpu will be freed up? When I am running indigo, often times other tasks become very slow..

I hope both get used, and then some... =D

I don't think that's possible.

So yes Neo, as far as I know the CPU does not take any load in GPU rendering.

Depends on exactly what the GPU is doing...
http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/index.php?title=LuxRays

neo0. wrote: When I am running indigo, often times other tasks become very slow..

It's probably because of a lack of RAM but have you made sure you are running Indigo in 'Background' mode?

This option runs Indigo on lower priority so it gives other programs a better chance of running normally.

If the GPU will "only" be doing ray-tri-intersections, the CPU still needs to be used to do the rest of the rendering process.

Well, whatever it does I hope it is atleast as fast as other GPU renderers. In octane, I remember pulling 3 million samples per second in a scene that had over 10 million polygons.. Whats more this scene was loaded in a few seconds.. I believe that this new speed should also be used to provide a greater variety of things that can be changed in real time.. If you ask me, feedback is the key to productivity... What if you don't like your depth of field or which object you wanted to focus on? Art is an organic process.. For example, take painting as an example, when you make a brush stroke or mix a color, you see the result instantly.. Imagine what these fields of art would be like if you had to wait several minutes to see the effects of each change..