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Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 7:26 am
by plaurits
Musorgki wrote:
lycium wrote:CoolColJ: We'll of course try to put as much flexibility in the rendering engine as possible, though it's a little too early to say exactly what - we'll see once the beta is out!
I agree with CoolCoJ, the ability to move the lights & camera around inside indigo would be fantastic!
And perhaps build the material editor into indigo to allow real time material updates/creation right inside your final scene! One can always dream :)

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2010 12:03 am
by madcoo
(Sorry for the dumb question...)
Where can you download Indigo's GPU-supported version???
Cheers!
:)

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2010 8:49 am
by Soup
Email us at support with your details and we'll get back to you
support@indigorenderer.com

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2010 6:34 pm
by madcoo
Thanks, I'll do!

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2010 1:18 am
by snorky
madcoo wrote:Thanks, I'll do!
me too

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 2:56 pm
by Xman
Thanks
I want to try a demo.I have sent for email.

Xman.

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:13 am
by filippo
Sorry but the GPU render don't work whit ATI?
I used a pc whit Ati radeon 1600 x series and I used a render engine that work in CUDA for acceletion the render...and the ati work very well, I saw add a cuda file...the pc is not mine, but l I used personally. the owner told me that they have added a CUDA file.


sorry for my poor languge

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:32 am
by Zom-B
Hey Filippo,

At this stage in devolpement of the GPU beta, it only works with Nvidia CUDA cards.
OpenCl support (for ATI etc. Cards) is planned at some point...

If you try it out on a Nvidia System, you need the latest (beta?!) Drivers, since CUDA also develops
with each driver release, and older drivers that maybe use CUDA aren't supported...

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 5:29 am
by ROUBAL
Hi indigo friends, There is probably something wrong again with IE7, and I wasn't able to login for a moment. I tried with Firefox, and I'm finally here.

As I'm always searching how to improve my works, as many of us, I use several render engines and I am open to new tools when they look interesting.

In the last months, I have discovered Octane GPU renderer, and I had put a lot of hope in it. I also purchased some expensive hardwares to use it at best, and updated my workstation with more memory and a 64 bits OS (Win7 prox64). A recent decision made by Octane developpers has very bad consequences for me : next update will require a full time internet connexion to work. Which is for various reasons not possible in my case (fully insulated workstation imposed by clients Non Disclosure Agreements as well as some other technical and practical reasons).

So, seeing Indigo coming to GPU (or CPU and GPU) rendering is very interesting for me because as my workstation couldn't support a big graphic card (not enough room and power supply), I have purchased a Cubix Xpander Pro 2 box : an expensive external case with 750W power supply and slots for two powerful graphic cards, connected on an internal small PCIE adapter. Currently I have only one Nvidia GTX 260 inside the box, and I was expecting to be able to purchase two GTX 480 in the next months. The display is done as before by my internal GTS 8800 - 512, and Octane uses for computing only the external GPU containded in the external Xpander.

I have read that currently indigo uses one GPU. I don't know if multiple GPU will be supported in the future, but if not, at least something could couterbalance this drawback :

Currently, one of the drawbacks of Nvidia Geforce cards (GTX 480 and other GTX) is the limited amount of VRAM memory available on these cards (currently 1.5GB).

More memory (currently 4GB) can be found on very expensive Tesla or Quadro cards, but they are actually ouf of my budget, and I probably will never afford them) . As Octane loads the full project in parallel on all Graphic cards, the available memory is not cumulated, and is the amount of the card supporting the more memory space. This is really a problem and due to the limited memory size, scenes size is limited as well as the size of rendered images when you render a complexe scene, reducing a lot the possibilities when you want to render in Full HD or 4k.

---- > So I would like to know more about memory management in indigo CPU/GPU system : Is the project also limited by the memory amount of the GPU cards, or is it loaded in the main computer RAM, allowing for example to use all the usable part of my 8GB RAM, so around of 7GB (due to 1GB eaten by OS) ?

Even if only one External GPU is supported (slower rendering time than with two cards) , the ability of working on really big scenes would be actually a big plus for indigo and I would be very happy if I could get the advantage of my Cubix box with indigo !

Thanks in advance for any information you could give me about indigo CPU/GPU memory management.

Best regards,

Philippe.

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 8:11 am
by StompinTom
As far as I understand, Indigo doesn't rely on the graphic card's memory limit. Instead, it uses a hybrid CPU + GPU approach where the CPU must be fast enough to feed the GPU sufficiently. I think that if the CPU isn't fast enough, the GPU may not be fully utilized so a balance needs to be established. Currently there are some limits to how big the scene is, but it IS in beta stage and Nick mentioned that those limits would soon be gone once the system was made more robust.

I'm sure that in the future multiple GPUs will be supported and most likely improvements will be made in how the workload is distributed across the CPU and GPUs.

I'm sure that the Indigo guys can give you a better, much more complete, answer!

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 10:51 am
by lycium
Ahh, good old StompinTom... It may be his birthday, but he'll still take the time to be helpful on the forum :) What a guy! Thank you and happy bday mate! 8)


ROUBAL: Our hybrid system caches only the bare minimum data on the GPU and fully supports instancing, so a little onboard memory will go a long way. We don't store the final image on the GPU, so you can lay this particular concern to rest - rendering very large and high quality images is easily possible with Indigo.

There are some annoying limitations in CUDA that we're working around at the moment in order to maximally utilise the available memory. Indigo's GPU rendering support is already vastly improved over the 2.4.7 release :)

We'll keep you all updated, things are moving fast and some announcements are due soon!

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 12:47 pm
by Headroom
lycium wrote:There are some annoying limitations in CUDA
Yup. The most annoying one is actually that it only runs on Nvidia cards ;-)

Ok. I'll shut up now :-)

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 1:18 pm
by lycium
Yeah I think I should say a few words about that...

We invested a lot of time and effort into getting the OpenCL acceleration going, and the return on investment was not very encouraging unfortunately. In contrast, CUDA has consistently proven itself to be a capable and mature platform; it's not without its idiosyncrasies - OpenCL is overall a "nicer" API - but CUDA seems to hold much more performance potential right now.

So what we're doing now is pushing that to the point where it's sufficiently fast and stable to serve as a benchmark which OpenCL should meet, at least on the same hardware. Any problems we encounter along the way will be reported to the appropriate vendors.

Platform independence is still very much part of our GPU plans.

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 4:50 pm
by neo0.
OK, I really don't know jack about coding, but I have a few questions :
1) Wouldn't it be more prudent to store the scene geometry on the gpu memory?

2) Wouldn't it be better to use the gpu for more than the bare minimum? Are there plans to make it use more of the gpu, or atleast give us the option to adjust this?

3) What sorts of things are calculated on the GPU? Tonemapping? Tracing?

Re: Indigo Renderer GPU acceleration

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 5:46 pm
by lycium
1.) we already do.

2.) i said storing the bare minimum, not doing the bare minimum.

3.) i'd tell you but then i'd have to kill you.