Indigo Renderer Forum

We chose the motion blurred teapots because it stresses our GPU code pretty well. For interiors, especially with lots of glass and when using exit portals, you'll probably still want to use CPU bidirectional - it's just algorithmically very efficient. Having said that, I've been given some interior scenes by Zom-B, which I'll check out soon!

There's been a huge response to the GPU beta and we'll mail everyone back today with more info about how the beta will proceed

My thoughts exactly whaat, although the ronen bekerman exterior is impressive for 3 minutes.

I really liked it, but you guys may want to come up with a wide variety of tests to show off the new speed capabilities.

That's true; Nick and I finished off that announcement at 3AM, so it definitely could have been more comprehensive!

I'll address this ASAP.

Lycium

Any insight into how fast the 5850/5870 ATI cards are vs Nvida when both brands are running on OpenCL?

And is Indigo going to support multiple cards?
2x5850 or 2x470GTX is way more grunt than a single 5870/480gtx for almost the same price!

Is there an OS/display slowdown/freezing when rendering on the cards?

I prefer to go the ATI route :)

CoolColJ wrote:Any insight into how fast the 5850/5870 ATI cards are vs Nvida when both brands are running on OpenCL?

Right now NVIDIA cards are faster than ATI doing OpenCL; we're allowing ourselves more time to optimise performance on ATI cards before incorporating it into the beta.

CoolColJ wrote:And is Indigo going to support multiple cards?

We could add support for it, but usually the CPU is the performance limiter so there's usually no benefit from using a 2nd GPU.

CoolColJ wrote:Is there an OS/display slowdown/freezing when rendering on the cards?

I'm not noticing as much jitteryness using the GTX 470 at home as I did with the GTX 260 I was using previously; the ATI cards don't lag much either.

It's probably reasonable to expect some amount of display lag if you're using the same GPU for compute and display, since we are trying to get a reasonable amount of work done with each GPU call to keep a low system overhead.

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

I have a quadro fx1700 on a E8400 xp home system, if you need a beta tester.... :)

Hi!
Is it possible to use one GPU for compute and the other one for display?
(I have Nvidia Quadro FX 1500 (no CUDA support) and wonder if I still can make some use of it.)

Hi drosophilia - Indigo uses only one gpu at the moment, and it only uses 50% of the gpu's power (we depend heavily on the cpu) - so it won't lag your computer too much.

I have an ATI Radeon 4670 on long term loan with my new setup, until I figure which way I'll go with a new Video card.

Will this work? It does seem to be supported in the ATI Stream OpenCL drivers

This is great news! I'd love to get my 5870 in on this action. :D

Well it's a rainy weekend in wellington - so we'll see what thomas gets up to.

benn wrote:Well it's a rainy weekend in wellington - so we'll see what thomas gets up to. :)

Does that mean he'll be inside coding instead of boozing in the streets and loitering? That Thomas!

Yup, no boozing for me. Even so, there's still a little bit left to do before the distribution can go out to the beta testing group... it's still reliant on CUDA DLLs being present; this dependency needs to be removed, and there are some little GUI issues leftover from 2.4.3 I'd like to resolve first. I've done some beta-beta testing with a friend from this forum, seems to work well for him on his GeForce 9800 GT

The release should be done in the next day or two. Thanks for your patience!

Dear all,

We are currently considering in investing a small cluster for indigo renders and other tasks. We usually work with pro cards (Quadro FX), will this be supported by the upcoming versions of Indigo for GPU render? Or should we first go to gamer cards to ensure the compatibility? (This is a less preferable option, as we use Quadros for other things).

Thanks for the info

Etienne