Indigo Renderer Forum

Hi all,

We've announced support for GPU acceleration with some preliminary results here: http://www.indigorenderer.com/node/1012

You'll need a GeForce 9xxx series or newer for CUDA support, and a Radeon 5xxx series or newer for OpenCL support. Of course the corresponding Quadro / Tesla and FirePro / FireStream cards are also supported for workstation users.

Feel free to post your questions here, and get in touch if you're interested in beta testing!

Congrats! The images are great, the gpu + cpu vs cpu image is really good.
8)

lycium wrote:...Radeon 5xxx series or newer for OpenCL...

Oh. Older cards, like 4870x2 are not supported due to their beta support of openCL. Is there a chance, that it will be supported later?

They aren't officially supported because of their lack of GPU shared memory, which we make extensive use of. Performance wouldn't be good, since it emulates it with global (main) memory, which is much slower.

Well, that's the expectation really. I just heard on IRC that Lux has some pretty good results using Radeon 4xxx series, maybe we're missing something (besides hardware to test on!)...

edit: aha, ok :)

Hi.
I have a later 2009 iMac, equipped with an ATI 4850 graphics card and, yes, LuxGPU performs very well with it.
I will be very grateful if you add support for these cards, now I´m a little sad with Apple for launching what otherwise is an excellent machine (includes a decent performer i7 CPU), but equipped with this stripped down GPU in OpenCL terms. I cant understand why one of the marketing points of the Snow Leopard launching was OpenCL and after that, Apple does such things.
I´ve read in some forums (AMD ones) that is possible to overcome this inconveniences on 48xx ATI GPUs with OpenCL.
Keep your good work going on!
Best regards.

Great to hear, though you may want to include rendering times on all of those pictures.

Yup, we're going to update the article to be more formative; the Buddhas scene rendered in 30 minutes, and all renders were done using a 2.6GHz i7 paired with a GeForce GTX 260.

the missing support of the Radeon 4850 which is in the current 27" i7 iMacs definitely throws my plan out the window for a new iMac later this year.

The only other alternative (for me) is a relatively cheap home built Linux box with a current AMD 4-core and a nice 5-series Radeon. It would be placed in the basement and work only as a network render slave. I had really hoped to be done with all that hardware tinkering. That's why I have an iMac!

Support of the 4850 would really be nice, provided there are no compelling technical reasons preventing it!!!

The top priority for now is to improve OpenCL performance in general to the level we're seeing with CUDA. Even on NVIDIA cards we're not getting the same performance using OpenCL as with CUDA, and with ATI we have architectural differences to contend with too.

Dont worry, Lycium, I understand there are more important goals in your deadline now that working in ATI 48xx OpenCL support. My other rendering machine is a PC box equipped with an NVidia card.
But consider it in the future, as Mac is so closed when we speak of GPU choices, and a complete line of desktop machines, the new iMacs, comes with the dreaded ATI 4850.

Cheers.

..sorry for the dumb quesion: I have a GeForce 8800GTS... will GPU features work with that?

Unfortunately not The 8800 GTS is first generation GeForce 8 and doesn't support crucial features we use; it's confusing because the later-released 8800 GT does have the required (compute model 1.1) functionality.

Sorry about that, and I hope you can find an inexpensive GPU meeting this requirement - actually we should buy one for you, considering what amazing work you do with Indigo!

...Is 8800GTX no use, too?

It looks like the 8800 GTX is compute model 1.0 too, and so lacks the feature support needed.

It's technically possible for us to use those GPUs if we make some fairly drastic changes to the source, but without the features provided by CUDA compute model 1.1, it's so slow as to make using the GPU a net loss to performance anyway; the features added by 1.1 are really crucial.