All posts related to V2
User avatar
By Jakob Ryngen
#330393
Hello,
I am upgrading my graphic card pretty soon and notice that the card I favour does not support CUDA. How likely is it that Maxwell will support CUDA in the future?
Thanks,
Jakob Ryngen
By JTB
#330396
Nobody can answer this for the next three years... What I can say, is that the next release with realtime preview will be CPU based only so CUDA is not needed.
User avatar
By max3d
#330400
JTB wrote:Nobody can answer this for the next three years... What I can say, is that the next release with realtime preview will be CPU based only so CUDA is not needed.
Nothing in the world is certain, but I dare say that in three years time most of the people will be rendering on CUDA or similar cards. If -and I don´t expect that to be the case- Maxwell wouldn´t support that users will just switch.

However buying hardware based on future developments for the next three years is rarely wise. Buy what would at the moment be the best solution for your current needs and only if the extra costs are low consider a technology you expect to use within a year. As at the moment a very capable CUDA card can be had for less than 200$ I would do that because it gives you the opportunity to play with the new technology. When you´re ready to really adjust your production workflow you already have some experience. Nobody however can predict what requirements there will be for a CUDA production renderer in more than a years time.

Maybe Maxwell´s next major release is much faster on CUDA but requires a card with more than 2 MB mem, which at the moment is extremely expensive, but could well be available somewhere mid 2011. Or OpenCL gets an enormous boast suddenly and enters the playing field.

Spending a lot on future possible developments makes rarely sense. Hardware becomes cheaper is the basic rule so don´t exclude yourself from some experiments, but only seriously invest in specific technology when the software you want to use supports it.

Max.
User avatar
By Jakob Ryngen
#330432
Thanks for the replies. So going for a CUDA-card below $200 is really pointless (for non-gaming purposes)? Does that apply Photoshop as well?
User avatar
By Half Life
#330443
Yes... CUDA (and GPU processing outside of visuals) is poorly supported outside of a few specialized tasks. That may change but as of right now faster CPU & more RAM is a better general purpose buy for most things than a fast video card w/CUDA. You can always add on card later if need be... so I wouldn't spend alot.

Best,
Jason.
User avatar
By max3d
#330619
Jakob Ryngen wrote:Thanks for the replies. So going for a CUDA-card below $200 is really pointless (for non-gaming purposes)? Does that apply Photoshop as well?
Maybe I was unclear. If I stood for the choice to buy a new system now and needed to buy a reasonably fast videocard anyway for a decent user interface etc I would buy the GTX460 which can be had for less than 200$ at 1 GB. If the budget is tight I would take the GTS450. It´s brandnew, quite fast and quite a lot cheaper. Again make sure it´s the 1Gb version.

edit: current pricing below 130$ from a prime brand with 1 GB mem http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... _-14130572

Like I said you can then play with CUDA (the 450 can do this as well), download demo´s of f.i. Iray of Mental Images which unlike the poster above states is not a low quality renderer but converges to the standard Mental Ray quality output. Nothing to sneeze at.

Cuda will help in parts of photoshop and Premiere Pro will be enormously speed up. The Mercury engine will suddenly fly and make it possible to render your movie effects at enormous speeds.

OpenCL is currently not supported by Iray or Adobe as it´s very slow and not a mature programming environment so its skipped by most developers until the OpenCL standard is further enhanced which seems to stagnate. Even if OpenCL would succeed which is well possible in the years to come it is supported by both Nvidia and ATI hardware. Implementations on Nvidia are currently much faster although way behind the same app programmed in the CUDA environment.

Hope this helps deciding.

Max.
User avatar
By Mihnea Balta
#330651
Those images say nothing about how mature OpenCL is. Mature means stable drivers, stable development tools and stable features. OpenCL has none of those at the moment. Try running that thing on ATI.
User avatar
By Carl007
#330653
Mihnea Balta wrote:Those images say nothing about how mature OpenCL is. Mature means stable drivers, stable development tools and stable features. OpenCL has none of those at the moment. Try running that thing on ATI.

So true, but with my little knowledge of the maturity of opencl and seeing vray rt performing good, made me think that it is a great and "mature" :)
User avatar
By Bubbaloo
#330654
Carl007 wrote:
Mihnea Balta wrote:Those images say nothing about how mature OpenCL is. Mature means stable drivers, stable development tools and stable features. OpenCL has none of those at the moment. Try running that thing on ATI.

So true, but with my little knowledge of the maturity of opencl and seeing vray rt performing good, made me think that it is a great and "mature" :)
That's the excellent marketing at work. :wink:
User avatar
By max3d
#330708
Bubbaloo wrote:Scheduled to be released to subscription customers of 3dsMax, is Iray, supposedly by the end of the month. I can't wait to put it through it's paces, and bust out some comparison renders with Maxwell.
Hi Bubbaloo,

It was a great shame that the powers that be at Autodesk again failed to integrate a decent piece of software into their 2011 release. That's what happens if you outsource your money makers to a chinese shop. They lost all knowledge of their own core ever since the developers all walked away. It's completely hopeless internally.

The guys from mental images are steaming with frustration as they know how to do it. Gary Yost the current MI VP in charge of the US and lotss of other active team members until Max 5 or 6 now work for MI so they were adamant it would be easy. However on every engineer Autodesk employs five Q&A guys to get the buck out on a simple integration job. They were afraid to give the go ahead as they already lost control on some other 'plug in' (read third party bought) renderers. There is no engineer who understands their radiosity engine. I worked to get that fixed and finally they had to admit that they were clueless.

Anyway you will like Iray a lot. Beautiful renders just like MR as it converges. It's not as fast as f.i. Octane but that's not because of the quality per se but also because it was done in a hurry so not optimized yet and had to be a hybrid for political reasons causing unneeded overhead. If Autodesk releases it with the option to disable the CPU, better do so. It's 0,2% faster with the CPU enabled as well and this was with a high end i7 together with a single low end 200$ GTX460. Better choose for GPU only as it leaves your CPU free to do other lowly but needed jobs. Better workflow.

In my system it's only three times as fast but I hardly threw money at an optimum GPU system. For 200$ more I would have had twice the speed etc. I only use in on my non production play system like I do with all other renderers I test.

However once you have used the brush accelerator you will never go back. That defeats everything. You just use the brush (you control the diameter) to an area where you expect problems or where you are interested in the real look of your material and it concentrates all that power there. I can't remember exact but it's something like 200 times as fast as the already fast normal GPU solution. So within seconds you have done the work of hours and hours of rendering and just know how it will look. Just use that brush on all potential points, paint a bit with it and your model looks great. Then disable it again and iRay will just go on rendering with your already done spots already clear. Leave it cooking for an hour or so and you have a perfect render, but you knew that after 30 seconds max. Really revolutionary for the whole workflow!

I know guys with four C20xx's and you won't believe your eyes then. It's like sitting on Zeta's renderfarm.

Max.
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