Chaos Corona Forum
Chaos Corona for 3ds Max => [Max] General Discussion => Topic started by: Hany666 on 2014-08-20, 11:32:44
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Hello,
I have a question about the corona render speed. In future will be some speed improvements?
Because this is really good renderer, but rendering image in 3.5K res is problem.
Thank you
Lukas
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Buy another machine or two and use distributed rendering. Or use Rebus; I think they support Max+Corona.
Corona is extremely fast for what it does, but since what it does is a very accurate simulation of light it's going to be pretty slow. Something like irradiance caching would speed things up but it would also remove some of the appeal of Corona.
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Single picture at 3.5K takes around 2 hours or three in my system, is that too much?
Cheers.
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I need 3.5K less than 20 minutes. 1 Hour or 2 per picture is not usable for the production. Corona has really nice renders but speed is key for me.
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Well then use Furryball or Unreal Engine. That will get you a lot further if you need speed but do not care about quality. Or keep using Vray.
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I need 3.5K less than 20 minutes. 1 Hour or 2 per picture is not usable for the production. Corona has really nice renders but speed is key for me.
With 140 cores I have, I do not manage 20 minute finals, in any of engines I use.. that's simply where Backburner and careful planning comes in.
I dislike to get into this comparison...and I know some people would oppose..but if I compare Vray3 BF/LC, Corona can be very much faster in certain scenarios (of course, it's missing adaptivity so you do get that stuck noise somewhere,but this is just for now).
Do not except of Corona speed that other renderers don't attain under 'same' conditions. The conditions mostly mean 'same quality'. Yes, I can optimalize fullHD render to minutes in Vray, but at what cost ? Heavy. If we're looking at high-end hi-res stills, it's hours, not matter what, in any engine.
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Mmm, why are you missing adaptativity? With bucket enabled you get adaptativity, maybe not as adaptitive as in other render engines, but it's working preatty well :)
I agree, 3.5k with quality in 20 minutes... it's at least hard if not impossible wiht current cpu's, of course you can use a "real time" render engine, but Corona won't give you those times I'm afraid.
Cheers.
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I need 3.5K less than 20 minutes. 1 Hour or 2 per picture is not usable for the production. Corona has really nice renders but speed is key for me.
As long as a print-resolution image finishes over night, I'm not too bothered about render speed. But if you really need high-res in 20 minutes or less, your only really good option is to wait until Redshift is ported to Max in a month or two. A machine with dual Titans will render a normal interior at 3.5k in less than 10 minutes, I'd wager.
Edit: though keep in mind that Corona is the sort of engine where you need to spend next to no time at all worrying about render settings, and the progressive nature means that you KNOW you will have an image finished after a certain amount of time. Redshift is really fast, much faster than Corona, but you're right back in the V-Ray swamp of managing irradiance cache settings, light samples, anti-aliasing, etc etc etc.
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I'm shocked that someone is complaining about the speed, Corona is the fastest/quality render engine out there.
20mins for a 3.5k image is nuts !! seriously buy some hardware if you need to increase speed.
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Mmm, why are you missing adaptativity? With bucket enabled you get adaptativity, maybe not as adaptitive as in other render engines, but it's working preatty well :)
Because that's not it and I am not interested in buckets :- ).
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The progressive adaptivity that has recently been removed was pretty usable. You could set gi samples to 2 and then most pixels would get only 2 samples and those above the given threshold would get 2*x samples after y passes. It worked pretty well, not sure why Keymaster removed it. I hope because he's preparing an even better version. :)
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I need 3.5K less than 20 minutes. 1 Hour or 2 per picture is not usable for the production. Corona has really nice renders but speed is key for me.
As long as a print-resolution image finishes over night, I'm not too bothered about render speed. But if you really need high-res in 20 minutes or less, your only really good option is to wait until Redshift is ported to Max in a month or two. A machine with dual Titans will render a normal interior at 3.5k in less than 10 minutes, I'd wager.
Edit: though keep in mind that Corona is the sort of engine where you need to spend next to no time at all worrying about render settings, and the progressive nature means that you KNOW you will have an image finished after a certain amount of time. Redshift is really fast, much faster than Corona, but you're right back in the V-Ray swamp of managing irradiance cache settings, light samples, anti-aliasing, etc etc etc.
Is that Red shift 3d really worth buying ???? {a layman Q}
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Is that Red shift 3d really worth buying ???? {a layman Q}
https://www.redshift3d.com/cms/ce_image/made/cms/assets/user_gallery/Mercedes_Charles_Outdoor-Black1080P_1200_675.jpg
I you're missing this surrealist touch inaccurate lightning solution provides then yes :D
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Is that Red shift 3d really worth buying ???? {a layman Q}
https://www.redshift3d.com/cms/ce_image/made/cms/assets/user_gallery/Mercedes_Charles_Outdoor-Black1080P_1200_675.jpg
I you're missing this surrealist touch inaccurate lightning solution provides then yes :D
can you elaborate in brief please ............Thanks
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Is that Red shift 3d really worth buying ???? {a layman Q}
If you're a Maya or Softimage user, then yes. It's not as accurate or as easy to use as Corona, but it's really really fast.
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can you elaborate in brief please ............Thanks
I believe he was being sarcastic :) ...meaning it has unrealistic/surreal lightning
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can you elaborate in brief please ............Thanks
I believe he was being sarcastic :) ...meaning it has unrealistic/surreal lightning
Which is silly, because you can use any render engine to produce unrealistic results. Redshift doesn't produce quite as realistic images as Corona, but on the other hand it is WAY faster, deals with large scenes much better, and has a bunch of other "production features" like volumes and whatnot. If you need really really good interior renders and don't mind the render time, Corona is a great choice. If you need features Corona lacks, or you need really fast render times, and you can live with the slight reduction in realism, Redshift is a great choice. It's basically V-Ray on the GPU.
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Which is silly, because you can use any render engine to produce unrealistic results. Redshift doesn't produce quite as realistic images as Corona, but on the other hand it is WAY faster, deals with large scenes much better, and has a bunch of other "production features" like volumes and whatnot. If you need really really good interior renders and don't mind the render time, Corona is a great choice. If you need features Corona lacks, or you need really fast render times, and you can live with the slight reduction in realism, Redshift is a great choice. It's basically V-Ray on the GPU.
I can't say anything about it since I have never used it, I was simply trying to explain the sentence. I am one of those that will never say a bad thing about any render engine out there since I have seen amazing artwork using all kind of render engines - even scan-line can produce really stunning images if the artist knows what he is doing.
Render engine doesn't make someone a better artist, it only makes it easier to achieve something.
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Thanks for all answers ..........did one test in maya ........render took 37 sec to render 2.5k res
not bad at all................but it is like going back to vray.........even though quality can be tweaked in post with some bunch of passes ......over all its good..........BUT I LOVE corona....its my friend (in my life if i make a friend i will never leave them)
(http://s30.postimg.org/w9frurym9/test_redshift_3_D.jpg)
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can you elaborate in brief please ............Thanks
I don't really like how biased render .. render, and a few examples I saw on redshift gallery were exactly in the direction I dislike. Very artificial mood, chairs seem to float (aka contact shadows somewhat lost) etc...
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Which is silly, because you can use any render engine to produce unrealistic results. Redshift doesn't produce quite as realistic images as Corona, but on the other hand it is WAY faster, deals with large scenes much better, and has a bunch of other "production features" like volumes and whatnot. If you need really really good interior renders and don't mind the render time, Corona is a great choice. If you need features Corona lacks, or you need really fast render times, and you can live with the slight reduction in realism, Redshift is a great choice. It's basically V-Ray on the GPU.
It's not silly sir, I'm just saying what you're saying too in a raw way. If you can bear this kind of render then yes it worthes its cost.
https://www.redshift3d.com/cms/ce_image/made/cms/assets/user_gallery/Image4_1200_900.jpg
The good old chairs flying foot etc... of course its more bearable in video prod.
Thanks for all answers ..........did one test in maya ........render took 37 sec to render 2.5k res
not bad at all................but it is like going back to vray.........even though quality can be tweaked in post with some bunch of passes ......over all its good..........BUT I LOVE corona....its my friend (in my life if i make a friend i will never leave them)
(http://s30.postimg.org/w9frurym9/test_redshift_3_D.jpg)
Then you should use cry engine, it's doing 8K in 0.3 to 0,5s :D
http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/7/5690514/crysis-3-8k-resolution-screenshots
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/k_putt/sets/72157644191959442/
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Utroll i can understand you............However we need to understand others hard work Tooo...........i love Corona and as i have said above corona is my friend
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Which is silly, because you can use any render engine to produce unrealistic results. Redshift doesn't produce quite as realistic images as Corona, but on the other hand it is WAY faster, deals with large scenes much better, and has a bunch of other "production features" like volumes and whatnot. If you need really really good interior renders and don't mind the render time, Corona is a great choice. If you need features Corona lacks, or you need really fast render times, and you can live with the slight reduction in realism, Redshift is a great choice. It's basically V-Ray on the GPU.
It's not silly sir, I'm just saying what you're saying too in a raw way. If you can bear this kind of render then yes it worthes its cost.
https://www.redshift3d.com/cms/ce_image/made/cms/assets/user_gallery/Image4_1200_900.jpg
The good old chairs flying foot etc... of course its more bearable in video prod.
Have you actually tried Redshift? The whole "flying foot" thing is likely a modelling issue; I haven't had any problems with missing shadows and the like. Redshift works really well in brute force + cache mode, and because the first bounce is brute force it catches basically every last detail. I'm sure you can configure RS to give you problems like this -- just like you can with V-Ray.
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Please give us real scenario, an interior scene with reasonable amount of geometry, textures, etc.
Exterior scènes are fast to compute, and corona does them fast also.
But the real stress test is interior scènes. And we are not always doing exterior scènes.
I'm tired of these démos, always showing that the renderer is fast, but without real challenge.
Also, 3 gtx 780 for that result only? Not so impressive. And with DOF, the noise is slow to go away. I'm sure corona with 3 machines (for the 3 gtx) + the base one = 4 machines/cpu's in total would have done better.
Seriously, I'm not so amazed by gpu rendering so far. So many highend cards to buy, only to obtain a little improvement at the end, and oh, scalability doesn't seem good as well, not to mention the difficulty to program stuff for it.
I don't understand this gpu hype. They'd better develop new cpu cards, improve software, and leave the gpu for games and display...
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Seriously, I'm not so amazed by gpu rendering so far. So many highend cards to buy, only to obtain a little improvement at the end, and oh, scalability doesn't seem good as well, not to mention the difficulty to program stuff for it.
I don't understand this gpu hype. They'd better develop new cpu cards, improve software, and leave the gpu for games and display...
Than you are smarter than most and don't fall easily for marketing scam :- ). GPU rendering is indeed still mostly just 'hype'. It's not 10 000 times faster, it's not 10 times faster either. It IS faster considering its parallel nature and
the fact that GPU chips (by both nVidia and AMD) evolved quite much more than CPU chips did over the last 5 years, but at what cost ? Until Redshift came, you had two options: Fit your scene into mainstream gaming card (Radeon, GTX), which go between
2 to 6GB, but c'mon, 6GB is still nothing. Or, pay for re-branded "pro" cards and get 6 to 12GB of Vram at 10!!! times the cost (Quadro, Tesla for Cuda, and FirePro for OpenCL), at which it was no longer scalable or cheap. It was in fact, more expensive.
GPU rendering is too much tied to drastically changing politics of GPU companies (AMD ignoring OpenCL development at times ? nVidia 'crippling' gamecards to literally force you to buy the same chip in pro segment ? Adding additional memory only when others (gamers, scientists,etc..) need it (so it took 4 years ! to get to 6GB in mainstream, congrats, you can render rotating cars).
Octane render came in 2009, 5 years ago with claims of gpu-rendering to be game-changer, revolutionary act. 5 years later...where is it ? Still nowhere. So maybe in next 3-4 years, it will do better, it might. But really, nothing amazing about it now,
just tons of cluessed brainwashed people by simple (and factually wrong) propaganda.
tl;dr: gpu rendering still sucks. Get over it.
{leg: I own Octane licence, did for many years. I use Unreal/CE3, I love GPUs, just not for pure ray-tracing }
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Glad to see I'm not alone.
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Also some people are not aware that with GPU rendering you always need +1 GFX card for display or your system becomes unusable while rendering.
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Well, Juraj, first of all, I agree almost completely with you. Even though I must admit that I am still using 3xGTX780's in my home i7 rig for some product shot renderings using Bunkspeed suite and which I cannot do in Corona yet.
It is way way faster then CPU and you simply cannot match the quality/speed of the latest mental images iray for lets say diamonds or something that needs real dispersion to look right.
For everything else, I definitely prefer standard CPU renderers.
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Well let me say that octane and iRay were a game changer, but not in the sense the said.
The change was people choice of unbiased or nearly unbiased over old biased techniques that remained unchanged for years.
Of course the GPU solution has been much worse than it was supposed to be but that is not because
the software behind it but because the Nvidia's greed.
How much time passed since we got the 580? It is the best rendering card behind the Titan, the problem...limited RAM, the other problem... They don't share CUDA... The other problem... ATI don't want to integrate CUDA...
MAXWELL architecture was suppossed to be astonishing for rendering, and the initial feelings is that it is a bit faster tha before... A bit... And Corona blasted any GPU with the good old CPU so...
So the GPU rendering solution may have not been bad... But the greed finished him IMHO we should be seeing real time 1080p frames totally clean by now with GPU... and that is not the case...
Cheers!
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Of course the GPU solution has been much worse than it was supposed to be but that is not because
the software behind it but because the Nvidia's greed...
...But the greed finished him IMHO we should be seeing real time 1080p frames totally clean by now with GPU... and that is not the case...
Cheers!
Well, I would say that it is not only nVidia's fault. I think there is a much bigger picture behind all of this - its all about business after all.
You must remember that CPU rendering is a huge business and I don't think it is going away anytime soon (even though GPU's could take over quite easily if you compare the raw processing power).
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Well let me say that octane and iRay were a game changer, but not in the sense the said.
The change was people choice of unbiased or nearly unbiased over old biased techniques that remained unchanged for years.
Of course the GPU solution has been much worse than it was supposed to be but that is not because
the software behind it but because the Nvidia's greed.
How much time passed since we got the 580? It is the best rendering card behind the Titan, the problem...limited RAM, the other problem... They don't share CUDA... The other problem... ATI don't want to integrate CUDA...
MAXWELL architecture was suppossed to be astonishing for rendering, and the initial feelings is that it is a bit faster tha before... A bit... And Corona blasted any GPU with the good old CPU so...
So the GPU rendering solution may have not been bad... But the greed finished him IMHO we should be seeing real time 1080p frames totally clean by now with GPU... and that is not the case...
Cheers!
Well, if I understood correctly, after fermi the aim for nvidia was to make gaming gpus less powerhungry and more effective for game engine rendering.. So the result was making gpus better for gaming but not so much with other stuff.. so yeah 580 should still be a monster for rendering with let's say iray even today (if the scene fits into vram)
And just as gpus develop further so does cpu.. The longer you see the gpu rendering development the more it seems that for most people are cpu renderers better value and more valid choice overall. If no revolution in gpu development will happen then it will simply stay that way.
Not saying that you can't do fancy stuff with gpus... You can if your work pays for it and fits within those limits gpus have.
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(even though GPU's could take over quite easily if you compare the raw processing power).
Why didn't they then? I've been hearing this line for the last 5 years, that was enough time IMHO. Are all GPU renderer developers just idiots? Or do they know how to take over the multi-million $ market, but don't want to?
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(even though GPU's could take over quite easily if you compare the raw processing power).
Why didn't they then? I've been hearing this line for the last 5 years, that was enough time IMHO. Are all GPU renderer developers just idiots? Or do they know how to take over the multi-million $ market, but don't want to?
Maybe it's because they would crash the money flow that CPU industry has. I mean, theoretically, when you compare a CPU with a GPU - GPU is way faster with computations. Then again GPUs running at 100% over longer periods are still way less reliable (temperature, quality, lifespan) then CPUs.
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Maybe it's because they would crash the money flow that CPU industry has. I mean, theoretically, when you compare a CPU with a GPU - GPU is way faster with computations. Then again GPUs running at 100% over longer periods are still way less reliable (temperature, quality, lifespan) then CPUs.
oh, so it is a conspiracy? Give me a fucking break...
theoretically, when you compare a CPU with a GPU - GPU is way faster with computations
"Theoretically" is important here. If you get down to any practical algorithms outside of what GPUs were originally designed for, the difference suddenly vanishes.
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oh, so it is a conspiracy? Give me a fucking break...
Everything revolves around money nowadays, so it wouldn't surprise me :)
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false. I wish I was on Intel's payroll to not use GPUs... :D
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false. I wish I was on Intel's payroll to not use GPUs... :D
Okay, "almost" everything, with "almost" as an important word! :D
Anyway, to make it short - I cannot see GPU-s bypassing CPU-s for rendering purposes in close future (for whatever the reason). Let's talk Corona now :)
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I am still using 3xGTX780's in my home i7 rig for some product shot renderings using Bunkspeed suite and which I cannot do in Corona
Can you post some tests? And, please, interior scènes with reflections and réfractions, and quite a bit of geometry complexity would be a good thing also.
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While it's true Keyshot and other mostly IBL based renderers are fast, so is fast Marmoset, and other real-time tools :- ) Material shading is simply easier to compute then full complex scenes. GPUs currently in CGI production mostly speed up calculations that are already fast/simpler in nature. (But I didn't try Redshift yet so take with slight grain)
Where Corona's speed shines, is where others don't, and that's complex scenes with intricate GI which is both fast and accurate. It completely wins on this field, and that feature alone is what makes is attractive.
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(But I didn't try Redshift yet so take with slight grain)
Redshift is basically... V-Ray on the GPU. It's got similar settings, similar setup, similar algorithms. Light cache, irradiance cache, adaptive anti-aliasing, etc.
It's much faster than Corona (with a decent GPU, at least), but it doesn't produce as nice results.
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Can you post some tests? And, please, interior scènes with reflections and réfractions, and quite a bit of geometry complexity would be a good thing also.
I have absolutely 0 interior or any arch-viz stuff ready for Bunkspeed. I am using it for jewelry, watches, mobile phones and sometimes cars rendering. You know the simple and fast stuff. Open the model inside of it, apply materials from the library and render 500-1000 passes in a minute - send it to a client - done. Not to mention that turntable animations are done in like maybe half an hour.
I was doing a photorealistic render of a diamond ring for one client a few years ago and he wanted a turntable animation of it as well. I wanted to die using V-Ray for it and it was the only render engine that had the ability to produce quite nice diamond look at the time. It took like an hour per frame. Then I have discovered Bunkspeed :) and it was working insanely good and fast on my GTX 580 at that time. Still using it for similar things nowadays.
All my arch-viz stuff is either V-Ray or Corona. It would take too much time to convert those scenes to Bunkspeed and re-apply all the materials. It is just not worth it, Bunkspeed wasn't made for it anyway.
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Bunkspeed is literally just iray packaged up in an easy to use interface. If you want to get an idea of how well it would perform rendering interiors, then just set up an interior to render in iray inside Max or whatever.
(spoiler: as evident by their architectural gallery (http://www.bunkspeed.com/home/gallery), results aren't great)
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Bunkspeed is literally just iray packaged up in an easy to use interface. If you want to get an idea of how well it would perform rendering interiors, then just set up an interior to render in iray inside Max or whatever.
(spoiler: as evident by their architectural gallery (http://www.bunkspeed.com/home/gallery), results aren't great)
Of course, but it still gets me to the point of setting up the lightning from the scratch and re-materializing everything. Cannot be bothered for a non-sense comparison :)
The best case scenario would be to use Corona for everything, but I just can't yet.
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Captain Obvious what do you mean with results aren't great? you are referring to render time or to final result?
I love Corona, but iRay delivered pretty neat results for me until I started to work with Corona, the bad thing about iRay is that it's GPU so to get a good farm you have to spend LOTS of money, the other bad thing is that is being developed by nVidia and it's evolution as a render engine is SLOOOOOW and it's evolution inside max is SLOOOOOWER if it can, and the other bad thing is that it's GPU so it's limited by the GPU Ram... so mooooore lots of money...but speaking about visual quality, that gallery may not be so pretty, but it's more in the artist hand than in the engine hand, you can see not-so-pretty renders made with Corona also, so I think in the majority of the cases is in the artist hand, at least when we speak about Corona or iRay.
And BTW; yes, Bunkspeed is iRay inside a different GUI and they are limited by the Nvidia development speed, they evolve faster than iRay inside max, but they are equally limited to what Nvidia delivers :P
Cheers.
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... and iRay development seems to have stalled at the moment.
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In the last release they added some render elements, but they are a bit different from standard elements, it's true that regarding performance and advanced rendering features it lacks a lot of evolution.
Sometimes I feel that companies like Nvidia make the development speed a lot slower so they can take leverage of our wallets as much time as they can :P
Cheers.
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Just to illustrate my point, why GPU rendering has lost it's opportunity, at least for the moment, this is the improvement (benchmark based) of the maxwell seires vs the previous tech :P
Cheers.
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wow! This is miserable improvement. Marketing at its best. Just like cosmetic upgrades of 3dsmax.
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GPU performance stalling (if it is a real thing, I dont know) would not mean the end of GPU renderers. They will just have to fully depend on own optimizations (like the CPU folk), because simply just waiting a year for faster GPUs will no longer be an option.
This would probably mean the end for bad renderers that do not put in any effort, but instead just use optix and expect it be be fast because GPU (oh hello hairy sphere!) ;)
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I don't mean that it's the end of GPU render engines, what I mean is that Nvidia had an opportunity to fagocitate a market, if they push up the performance as it was expected, if you search in google for "fermi maxwell graphic" you'll see their expectations, of course they say GFlops per Watt, I'm not sure if they are as efficient as they say, but performance speaking... Nvidia has become weak, they don't evolve at all.
The problem is that GPU render engines evolution is SLOW, and the reasons for that are the limitations that the GPU has like working with the system ram instead of the GPU ram, suddenly the GPU render becomes SLOOOOOW.
Maybe this will resucitate at some point, but for the time being I don't see Octane or iRay having an amazing evolution regarding their rendering speed, the latest Octane video was an exterior, why do they always show up the render engine with an exterior scene? that's not a real threat... why don't show up a relly complex interior scene, that is the most common scenario if you are outside the product viz market.
And here Corona it's astonishing regarding speed/quality ratio, of course I would like to see corona still faster hehehe but I will ever want Corona to be faster no matter how fast it is, maintaining quality of course, that's a professional deformation hahaha
Cheers!
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Captain Obvious what do you mean with results aren't great? you are referring to render time or to final result?
Both, I guess? iray can produce really good results, but it suffers from some pretty severe workflow limitations. Limited texturing, it's always limited by GPU memory (unlike Redshift, and Octane is also going in that direction), and it really is quite slow. For iray to be really fast you need a big cluster of GPU machines, and preferably Quadro-cards to get additional memory (which you will need), so the whole thing is going to be massively expensive. If you spent the same amount of money and just rendered in Corona or Maxwell, or hell even V-Ray, you'd probably get better results in less time.
One of the biggest strengths of Corona is that it's extremely well-integrated into 3ds Max -- more so than iray -- which means you don't need to adapt your workflow. It's not limited by GPU memory, it supports all (more or less) native textures, material blending, render elements, etc etc etc.
Just to illustrate my point, why GPU rendering has lost it's opportunity, at least for the moment, this is the improvement (benchmark based) of the maxwell seires vs the previous tech :P
I respectfully but strongly disagree. If you look at the new generation of Nvidia cards, the GTX 970 basically gives you Titan-level performance (albeit with 1/3rd less memory) for a significantly lower cost, at a significantly lower power level. The Titan was released about a year and a half ago, cost $999 and consumed 250 watts. Now, the GTX 970 gives you about the same performance for $329 and about 150 watts. In terms of performance per TCO* -- which is what really matters for a farm -- the 900-series is a huge improvement over the previous generation. Performance isn't vastly improved, but the power reduction and price reduction means you can buy more of them.
Additionally, the fact that they're able to get such great performance out of a card using a relative low amount of power, despite being manufactured using the same 28 nm fab, means that they have plenty of headroom to grow.
Honestly, in terms of hardware performance evolution, GPU rendering has never looked better. The new Haswell-E is a good improvement as well, but mostly for cost reasons. They're not much faster than the previous generation, but they are much cheaper.
* Total Cost of Ownership
The problem is that GPU render engines evolution is SLOW, and the reasons for that are the limitations that the GPU has like working with the system ram instead of the GPU ram, suddenly the GPU render becomes SLOOOOOW.
You really need to have a look at Redshift :-) it's not a perfect render engine, but it definitely shows that fast development and a plethora of features is possible on the GPU as well.
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Both, I guess? iray can produce really good results, but it suffers from some pretty severe workflow limitations. Limited texturing, it's always limited by GPU memory (unlike Redshift, and Octane is also going in that direction), and it really is quite slow. For iray to be really fast you need a big cluster of GPU machines, and preferably Quadro-cards to get additional memory (which you will need), so the whole thing is going to be massively expensive. If you spent the same amount of money and just rendered in Corona or Maxwell, or hell even V-Ray, you'd probably get better results in less time.
I never had problems with textures in memory with iRay, but I had with goemetry, A LOT of problems, you may not have some materials, but the main problem is in Nvidia's hand, that is what I said before
One of the biggest strengths of Corona is that it's extremely well-integrated into 3ds Max -- more so than iray -- which means you don't need to adapt your workflow. It's not limited by GPU memory, it supports all (more or less) native textures, material blending, render elements, etc etc etc.
Agree, specially the memory limitation thing.
I respectfully but strongly disagree. If you look at the new generation of Nvidia cards, the GTX 970 basically gives you Titan-level performance (albeit with 1/3rd less memory) for a significantly lower cost, at a significantly lower power level. The Titan was released about a year and a half ago, cost $999 and consumed 250 watts. Now, the GTX 970 gives you about the same performance for $329 and about 150 watts. In terms of performance per TCO* -- which is what really matters for a farm -- the 900-series is a huge improvement over the previous generation. Performance isn't vastly improved, but the power reduction and price reduction means you can buy more of them.
The picture I showed you show a 980 against a 780ti, where did you saw those benchmarks that put the 970 at the same performance level as a Titan? I'm really interested, and I'm also interested in a 980 vs Titan benchmark, I wasn't able to find anything that is not related to real time gaming performance, but the only GPGPU benchmark I found is that one.
Additionally, the fact that they're able to get such great performance out of a card using a relative low amount of power, despite being manufactured using the same 28 nm fab, means that they have plenty of headroom to grow.
Honestly, in terms of hardware performance evolution, GPU rendering has never looked better. The new Haswell-E is a good improvement as well, but mostly for cost reasons. They're not much faster than the previous generation, but they are much cheaper.
* Total Cost of Ownership
You really need to have a look at Redshift :-) it's not a perfect render engine, but it definitely shows that fast development and a plethora of features is possible on the GPU as well.
You are right, and here is where the greed comes out, there used to be two kinds of GPU's, as they are two kinds of CPU's, the ones with great power comsumption and the ones with great performance, now they pick the low powecomsumption series and name it as the best performance series and that's the flag, think if they still maintain the high performance series (wich does not exists at least publicly) we could be speaking about an astonishing difference for rendering performance.
Also they maintain 4Gb as the GPU memory... soooo great scenes will you be able to fit there... specially when you don't have instancing, and no matter what octane people says, if you use instancing in GPU you lower it's speed by a high factor, depending onw how many times do you use it, and iRay doesn't has instancing so... welll 4Gb is't nothing, so no spectacular opportunity for GPU rendering with those limitations.
Regarding Redshift, I don't like mental ray/vray render engines anymore, and I won't invest in a GPU farm to have a biased render engine going on when Corona has demonstrated that a biased render engine could be optimized to deliver an incredible speed, it just have to be worked out, for me such level of bias is a big NONO nowadays, and such level of complexity in configuration is also a big NONO also, that's why redshift has never been an option for me, also it's been said in this forum before, RedShift has great speed but it comes with a quality cost, I'm sure Corona could be able to deliver same speed with a similar quality cost, but IMHO it's just not it's pursued target.
Of course don't take my thoughts about RedShift as someting TRUE in capital letters, specially because I have not tried it personally, but I really don't have time to deal with another complex-to-configure render engine, I prefer to spend my time in creativity, modelling, texturing, animation, etc... :) and that is what Corona gives me.
Cheers!
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My point about Redshift was mostly that it demonstrates that GPU memory isn't necessarily a major impediment. I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible to implement exactly the same rendering algorithms that Corona uses, but with Redshift's GPU engine. I don't really like their approach, frankly. Aiming to replicate V-Ray or mental ray seems like a step backwards. It does, however, show that GPU rendering is a valid approach for high-end production work, and it really is massively fast. Even with my lame-ass Quadro 2000M, Redshift is significantly faster than V-Ray, iray, Octane and even Corona. I still prefer Corona because it gives better quality and has a better workflow, but in terms of performance... No, there is no way Corona could compete with Redshift on speed, if you had a machine with a GTX 980/970 or two. Not even on big heavy scenes. Especially not on big heavy scenes, in fact!
As I said: I still prefer Corona. But if the Redshift team manages to match Corona's rendering methodology, then I'm not so sure any more.
Edit: anyway, it's a moot point at this stage. Redshift is what it is. It's a great choice for some people, but for me Corona is a better choice. The only reason I brought it up is because it shatters a lot of myths about GPU rendering (memory limitations, limited to naive path tracing, lousy integration with the host software, etc).
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The thing is that Redshift, as far as I know, don't store the scene in the GPU memory, and that's because there are parts of the calculation that are being managed and done by the CPU in the system memory, that is why it does not have the GPU memory limit, and I think algorythms like the ones used in iRay, Octane or even Corona cannot be applied in that regard.
Anyways, I don't use RedShift, so I cannot speak a lot about it, but it's a complex render engine that can suffer from things like flickering and other problems, just like Vray or mental Ray, and that's a con for me, that's why I loved iRay, when I launched an animation it was rendered once and just once, beucase there was no render glitched on it, with Corona there could be a bit of flickering, but if you configure the HD cache settings (three settings!) with a simple number you will know that you will avoid flicker, and it still remains nearly unbiased, and that's why I loved Corona, even when the animation part is not worked out as much as it will be in the future, I like to render my projects once, and I like not having to re-render because the render engine introduced a glitch in some place becuase I configured it slightly lower to gain some speed.
Yes, GPU can be used for rendering in biased render engines, OFC, but what I think is that biased render engines as we know them are out of time, and Corona biased technique is the winner, at least in my opinion of course :)
Cheers.
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Maybe we will do comparing all render engines in this topic?)
As scene could be the "Corona bench scene".
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The thing is that Redshift, as far as I know, don't store the scene in the GPU memory, and that's because there are parts of the calculation that are being managed and done by the CPU in the system memory, that is why it does not have the GPU memory limit, and I think algorythms like the ones used in iRay, Octane or even Corona cannot be applied in that regard.
Not sure what you mean here. Redshift has memory buffers on the GPU. It stores the entire scene representation in GPU memory, and then it has buffers for things like triangles and textures. If the geometry or the textures exceed the buffers, it will dynamically offload stuff, but if the scene description itself can't fit, it'll fail to render.
Also, Redshift supports temporal interpolation for both the irradiance point cache (HD cache equivalent) and the irradiance cache, meaning you can blend values from several nearby frames. That stops flickering quite efficiently. V-Ray supports the same thing. It does mean you have to pre-render the pre-passes, but it's easy enough to automate if you have a render farm and easier still if you're rendering locally.
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I was referring to this from their FAQ:
"Since Redshift is a GPU renderer, it mostly depends on GPU performance. There are, however, certain processing stages that happen during rendering which are CPU or disk dependent. These include extracting mesh data from Softimage/Maya, loading textures from disk and preparing the scene data for use by the GPU. Depending on scene complexity, these processing stages can take a considerable amount of time and, therefore, a lower-end CPU can 'bottleneck' the overall rendering performance. While Redshift doesn't need the latest and greatest CPU, we recommend using at least a mid-range quad-core CPU such as the Intel Core i5."
Since they do swaping when the scene does not fit in the scene the CPU has an important role when you don't have enough memory, anyways I could have been understood this wrong, anyways I'm not interested in GPU rendering for the time being anymore hehehe it has a huge cost vs Corona render, I can get more CPU nodes than GPU nodes for the same price, in the end to support 2 to 4 GPU's you need a proper motherboard and an specific PSU, so you need a proper node.
With Corona I have an outstanding node for 800€, with any GPU render engine this price is impossible, I have some GPU nodes in my farm, but I prefer the CPU nodes, and I can assure you that I've been the most powerful defender of GPU rendering... until I tried Corona XD
Cheers!
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headoff to make a plausible comparison we have to invest a lot of time, properly configuring materials between render engines... this takes time, I'm all about doing it but I don't have the time right now :)
Cheers!
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The picture I showed you show a 980 against a 780ti, where did you saw those benchmarks that put the 970 at the same performance level as a Titan? I'm really interested, and I'm also interested in a 980 vs Titan benchmark, I wasn't able to find anything that is not related to real time gaming performance, but the only GPGPU benchmark I found is that one.
Ask and ye shall receive. (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/20) It's for a 980 rather than a 970 but it should be relatively easy to extrapolate performance based on clock speeds and core counts. The 980 is consistently around 50 % faster than the 780 Ti, which itself is roughly comparable to a Titan in terms of performance. The 970 should give roughly 75 % of the 980's performance, putting it firmly ahead of the Titan for single-precision computing. Double-precision is a different matter, but ray tracing is all single-precision.
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...it has a huge cost vs Corona render, I can get more CPU nodes than GPU nodes for the same price...
With Corona I have an outstanding node for 800€, with any GPU render engine this price is impossible...
Can you tell you setup, cpu model, ram, etc? Because, from my study cpu node is indeed much more expensive than a gpu. A highend pc (4930k based) would cost 1500 euros approx. While a gtx 780 6gb is 500 euros.
I woud have like to build cpu based render farm, but...
And I took the example of highend hardware here because, imo, a mid-range cpu isn't very worth the investment, what we are looking after is maximum firepower! :)
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I7-5820k, the cheapest ATX 2011-3 mother board you can find, the cheapest RAM you can find (preferible a 32Gb kit for every 2 nodes), the cheapest Hrd disk you can find, the cheapest case, a Decent 500W or 600W PSU, a cheap but Decent liquid cooling system, the cheapest but Decent case you can find and a passive cooled Nvidia GPU with 2gb of video memory, you can find all this for around 800€ :)
For me a node MUST be cheaper as it can be except for the CPU that has to be the one with the best performance/price ratio, in this case the 5820K IMO.
If something breaks I can find a replacement in no time and with very few money :)
You may think that using a cheap MOBO or a cheap RAM you loose some performance, in my experience over the years, that difference is mínimum.
For that GTX you need a node, the GTX alone does nothing :) of course you can assemble a node for that GPU for 400€ or 500€ with a cheap CPU, but then you are limited to GPU rendering, what will you do when you have to Render a scene that does not fit in 4Gb of Video RAM?
Cheers!
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For that GTX you need a node, the GTX alone does nothing :) of course you can assemble a node for that GPU for 400€ or 500€ with a cheap CPU, but then you are limited to GPU rendering, what will you do when you have to Render a scene that does not fit in 4Gb of Video RAM?
What will you do with your CPU farm when the scene doesn't fit in 16 gigs of memory? Add more to each machine?
The Octane people are adding out-of-core stuff. Redshift already has it. It won't be very long before out-of-core is the standard for GPU renderers, at which point 4 gigs of VRAM will be plenty for all but the craziest of scenes.
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Well, definitely need to try Redshift eventually, but will be like..December until I get there :- ). At the moment I sort of don't believe out-of-core rendering doesn't come at decent performance cost, so I find it hard to believe 4GB could be staple, but 8GB could be decent, let's see if any vendor will come forward with 980 version with that.
The Luxmark difference in favour of 980 vs 780Ti is interesting, but seems alone. Maybe the bigger memory bus ? Otherwise I have to defend this new line-up, 980 is not supposed to be contender against 780Ti, eventually 980Ti will surely come in some form.
The performance increase in past 3 generations of gpus is also quite better compared to CPU department. I really wanted to buy 8GB 980, but there is none right now...I will buy one anyway for gaming but if could snap 8GB I would be happy.
"iRay speed" is such oxymoron :- )
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At the moment I sort of don't believe out-of-core rendering doesn't come at decent performance cost
Oh, it most certainly does! But how big the performance detriment is, depends on numerous factors. Specifically: if you render a scene where the geometry is so heavy and the rendering so complex that it cannot keep all the geometry needed for that one bucket in memory at the same time, things can get awfully slow. However, if all that happens is that it can't keep the entire scene in memory and does most of the "paging" to RAM between buckets instead, the performance cost is much smaller. Basically, the less you go out of core, the better. A little bit of out-of-core only hurts performance by a very small amount, but doing it constantly means you might as well not render on the GPU at all.
For image maps, apparently the performance hit is so small that they don't even try to keep everything in memory. The default is a 128 megabyte cache that they just stream everything to, chunk by chunk. Because it can load individual pixels straight from the images in RAM, it doesn't really matter much.
Of course even if they do add out-of-core memory management to Octane it will probably benefit less than Redshift, since Redshift is a bucket renderer and Octane renders pixels "randomly," which would be terrible for geometry swapping.
The rumours are that the 8 gig 980s will be out later this year. I heard november-december.
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What will you do with your CPU farm when the scene doesn't fit in 16 gigs of memory? Add more to each machine?
Of course, can you say the same about the GPU? Plus the performance hit of out of core is not as big in CPU as in GPU
Anyways, I'm not closing that door, it's just that for me it's not a good investment, in the future... Who knows, anyways I don't believe too much in the out of core on GPU basically because even people from Nvidia says that it cannot be don without a considerable loss of performance, this was going to change, theoretically, with the Maxwell family, I'm not sure if it changes or not.
Please try a scene that takes 16Gb of ram in geometry and textures and try it in Red Shift or Octane, of course software advances day by day, it will evolve and maybe it will be better at some point, but let me say that currently the total cost it's not worth the investment, at least for me :)
Cheers!
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I saw some tests comparing Arnold and Redshift while constantly upping the amount of geometry. The machine had enough RAM to cope, but only 2-3 gigs of VRAM. Somewhere around the 200 million triangle mark, Arnold overtook Redshift because of out-of-core issues. But still, that's 200 million unique, un-instanced triangles with just a couple of gigs of VRAM, rendered with full GI.
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Did you tried Arnold? It is SLOOOOOOOOOOOW... So if Arnold outperforms RedShift that is a biased render engine designed to be fast at the cost of quality...
Cheers
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Arnold may be slow at some things, but it's fast at dealing with extremely heavy geometry. What do you think would happen if you tried to render 200 million unique triangles in Corona?
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It will crash of course, the out of core tech is not yet developed AFAIK.
Arnold is slow in every aspect, it's a great production render, very solid, and it gives an astonishing quality, but it is in the Maxwell side of the fence, Quality at the expense of excessive amount of time.
Still as I've said GPU is not a good investment for me, at least yet, and I won't recommend to anyone for the ti,e being, I did in the past, and I was wrong I have to admit, maybe with the next gen (after the 980 family) it will be awesome, for the time being, with Corona in the game, I'll stay with CPU.
BTW I say all this because Corona exists, if there is no Corona I'll be back to GPU rendering, even with all it's flaws, but I prefer Octane, iRay or even RedShift if I need it to being back to mentalRay or having to acquire VRay.
Think also that having CPU nodes let me leverage those nodes for more tasks, like distributed simulations or giving a CPU farm personalized service to small artists and studios, the GPU market is not a good investment yet for me, and I have several GPU's distributed across my farm for GPU rendering.
But... for me... Corona wins! Hahaha
Cheers.
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But... for me... Corona wins! Hahaha
Haha, same here. :-)
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What are you using as your bridge from modo ? , or are you just using max now as I 've noticed you are not around as much over there anymore?
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I still use modo a lot. I don't really do that much arch viz any more to be honest. I mostly write code.
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while we talk renderers and speed, gpu n cpu.... i'd like to ask the house : im thinking of upgrading to the new 8core haswell 8 processor and i would like to know if its worth it for corona's sake :) im currently using the i7 3.45ghz, so i would like to know what the possible difference could be in terms of speed(render times). assuming the benchmark scene rendered on my i7 3.4ghz for 6mins ,then what could be the possible render time on the haswell e processor? keymaster should hopefully have a clear idea on the possible outcome, right?....urgent, so i'd know if spending all that money on a bad ass processor is worth it..... over 2,000 dolls is no joke. thanks
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If you consider the price for an upgrade to be a lot of money then no, it's not worth it. If you've got a six-core @ 3.45 GHz right now, the 8-core Haswell-E isn't going to be that much faster. It might cut your 6 minutes into 4-5 minutes. Is that really worth two grand?
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If you consider the price for an upgrade to be a lot of money then no, it's not worth it. If you've got a six-core @ 3.45 GHz right now, the 8-core Haswell-E isn't going to be that much faster. It might cut your 6 minutes into 4-5 minutes. Is that really worth two grand?
Exactly my thoughts - Upgrading from a 6-core i7 (maybe even a 4-core i7 - like 4770/4790) to the new 8-core is gonna be pretty much some kind of a "sidegrade" for Corona. You might get something in the line of 25% speed increase (tops) for 2 grands. I wouldn't consider it an upgrade if it wasn't a dual Xeon setup.
Anyway, in the end, if you got some money to spare and you like to see any kind of improvement with your render times (and you will definitely), you could probably go for it. It won't disappoint you for sure - But it won't make you extremely happy either.
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im currently using the i7 3.45ghz
Please specify which i7 model you have exactly. Going from 6 core to 8 core might not be much improvement. But if you have a 4 core i7, especially the older ones, that 8 core can double the speed of your renders.