[Bubbaloo]

[Tok_Tok]

@Halflife

Oke let's say the fastest GPU would be just as fast as the fastest CPU. GPU would still be cheaper and therefore faster. Let me explain.
If you buy a motherboard with 4 Xeon sockets on it, that would cost you a lot of money, problebly close to a €1000. To fill those4 sockets would have to buy
4 i7 980's, which will also cost you around 800-900 euro's each.

If you buy a motherborad with only 1 socket and 6 PCI-express slots that would only cost you about €250. Then the fastest video card, now the GF GTX 480 i think, will
cost you €550 a piece. And you can fit 6 of them onto your motherboard. This would be faster and cheaper because you would have 2 more processors.

And here the GPU is said to be just as fast the CPU, which is not true according to all GPU rendering demo's.

Even if this is all neglectable, adding a fast GPU (or 2 or 3) to your computer system would be a major speed increase.

[Half Life]

Ah, lets not forget you have to deal with PCI speed bottleneck unless you get into something like Tesla solution:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_comp ... tions.html

Which is definitely NOT cheap -- and some GPU software do not support SLI or Crossfire (yet)...

Also GPU is lower grade processor than CPU so core-to-core comparison is not the same -- and you will have to do special liquid cooling for system with 6 cards running hot. Sounds like a space heater for sure

The idea is nice, don't get me wrong -- but the romance of the marketing has succeeding in convincing you that we can all have "super computing" on the normal budget... which is just not so. Maybe in 3-5 years it is more economical.

And it still is useless for most other apps to put all that money into the video card. (I'm not a gamer)

Best,
Jason.

[choo-chee]

maybe. but I hardly use multi-light for prints (maybe someone will create a special paper...), I don't use IBL (it's almost useless in interiors) and I prefer (since I have 4 PC's to render) the speed of Teracopy to send and recieve MXS or MXI's...

[Half Life]

Light (IBL or otherwise) from outside coming into and helping to light interior shots is one of the best improvements -- unless you are working in interiors with no windows you should see big improvement (especially with IBL, which makes large window/scenery nicer).

But as I say I understand your reasoning -- I need killer features to get me to pry open my wallet, because I'm super-frugal

Best,
Jason.

[Tok_Tok]

I don't understand why you are so pesimistic. Do you think all those company's are lying? Just to sell a few more licenses and lose their costumers in the future because their product is not working
as advertised. I really doubt that.

Also I was there when Autodesk had their first presentation of 3ds max 2011, showing Quicksilver. The software was biased and far from the quality that Maxwell produces, but it rendered a scene
in seconds instead of minutes.

I am not choosing a side and stick to it because i want to prove i'm right. Right now, GPU rendering seems very promising, for speed and the price. If anyone proves otherwise I would be happy to say
that i was wrong.

[Aji Enrico]

Ah, lets not forget you have to deal with PCI speed bottleneck unless you get into something like Tesla solution:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_comp ... tions.html
Which is definitely NOT cheap -- and some GPU software do not support SLI or Crossfire (yet)...

From tesla pages:

Code: Select all

System Interface  	PCIe x16 Gen2

It is the same as Geforce, so you can still use the cheep gamer cards.
SLI support in applications are not needed for parallel computing that skips the real-time (rasterization) part, at the present time.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=30740

Also GPU is lower grade processor than CPU so core-to-core comparison is not the same -- and you will have to do special liquid cooling for system with 6 cards running hot. Sounds like a space heater for sure

Indeed, around 500 smaller cores compared to 4 big cores, the numbers can make it up for the performance core-to-core.

Water cooling is not needed for for 4 GPUs.
Compared to the high end CPU based servers racks cooling system, they have powerful and da*n awfully noisy fans!(got some hp servers myself). So you might need to use extra fans to your multi GPU system in a regular computer case too.
You need better airflow regardless of a high end cpu based or high end gpu based computer.

The idea is nice, don't get me wrong -- but the romance of the marketing has succeeding in convincing you that we can all have "super computing" on the normal budget... which is just not so. Maybe in 3-5 years it is more economical.

Well, that's marketing ^^
GPU market is still young, can't say if it will be better than cpu yet. But it looks really promising!
Just compare the CPU evolution to the GPU evolution, GPU's tend to get 2x performance in a shorter period of time than compared to CPU. Good question to ask here is, when was the last time cpu got the 2x performance?

And it still is useless for most other apps to put all that money into the video card. (I'm not a gamer)

That's true, so is quad-socket-multicore-multithreading too!
When does multicore even speed up the regular applications?

When you buy a high end CPU based or GPU based computer system, your probably are not gonna surf the web with it. You have a specific task(s) you want to accomplish and GPU is a good alternative.

yes, it's only an alternative, not a substitution of CPU

[Half Life]

Promising -- yes! very much so... but I think alot of these companies are trying to position themselves with GPU because they have very little to offer that is different or exceptional.

It's like Burger King making a big deal about the fact their burgers are "flame broiled" -- but once you get past that you realize they are just a few shades different from McDonalds... but they emphasize how "different" and "special" it is because it's all they got.

Maxwell has THE top quality... hands down. Other companies can't have that so they have to put their marketing into some other feature.

You build a brand by setting yourself apart -- not by joining the crowd.

I'm far from cynical -- I'm amazed by the sheer coolness of what we can accomplish today... I grew up when personal computing was just getting started and I've seen the field go from monochromatic monitors and tiny processing power to things that you can't hardly tell are not photo's. It's amazing -- I just wish others could see that and not take it for granted.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I wasn't talking about the interface of the Tesla but rather the processing power and quality of components -- it's quality of components is MUCH higher than GeForce crap. ( I like Firepro cards personally) Also many motherboards only allows for 1 or 2 cards to be running 16x -- any more and you get downgraded to 8x.

Multi-core allows for alot of multi-tasking (which I usually have 4-5 softwares running at the same time) -- and i7 last year doubled the processing power... and they did it again this year (16 cores).

Personally, I think the goal should be a system that utilizes all facets of a systems resources for maximum performance -- but again it's all very young and it's easy to get carried away with the "glow of the new".

Best,
Jason.

[zdeno]

Half Life please answer to my previous post me as well. I feel a little lonely here.

I said that once but to save you searching ...
NL said bump, roughness model, hard shadows from IBL, grazing angles of metals and many other things were BAD. So instead relase service pack to 1.7.1 version they pack it in 2.0 version and I am stuck with bugfull version

anything new in 2.0 was IES support for lights and one-face SSS model. and it is not worth so many $ and much more Euros ( $ to Euro ratio is another lame idea).

So when GPU support will show I must reconsider upgrade again.

and another thing. Right now Vray is almost 10 times faster than maxwell in archviz interiors (of course depending on vray settings, and accepting lower quality)
but with GPU support it would become about 10 times faster so ... how many times it would be faster ? don,t forget with vray you have 10 rendernodes FREE ?

[Half Life]

I don't know man, that sounds like a pretty good deal -- maybe you should go for it

I don't know -- upgrade isn't that expensive, and they were giving away free render nodes not too long ago. Seems fruitless to complain further... unless you just want free.

How are they supposed to pay for staff to keep up (and create new) free plugins -- not to mention explore alternative means of gaining the additional speed you want?

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I just came across some hardware that haven't seen before that makes GPU expansion more feasible -- makes me eat some of my words about GPU hardware limitations:

https://www.cubixgpu.com/

They makes some really nice systems that solve some of my biggest reservations about GPU -- so I was wrong, or at least partially wrong

BTW, I already had seen these a while back:http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html but they cost way too much for what you get.

Best,
Jason.

[Bubbaloo]

[mgroeteke]

...
anything new in 2.0 was IES support for lights and one-face SSS model. and it is not worth so many $ and much more Euros
...

this is a completely wrong statement, point. what about stacked layers, new (much improved!) UI, color multilight, mxm web integration, new scripting, support of color spaces and other dozens of not-so-small new features? not to speak of a substancial speed improvement under certain scene conditions.

up to you to decide if you want to invest money to use those improvements or not, but its definitely not OK to make wrong statements like that one if you want to be taken seriously in a discussion here

cheers

markus

[Maximus3D]

Not to forget the much improved SSS and thinSSS we got. And all the plugins got much better integration now + the new plugins recently released. Good stuff!

/ Max