Gpu rendering

[3di]

I've just rendered 350 frames at 1080p using fstorm in 3 hours on one gtx1070.  The same animation rendered on 4 computers took 40 hours with corona :(  corona's like a wife I adore, and fstorm the busty  seductress I'm trying to look away from.  Come on corona, get that boob job!

[Christa Noel]

haha I like that funny statement :D
btw, fstorm 3hr 350frame from only 1 gtx1070 vs 4computers 40hr corona, that's an interesting battle. what cpu(s) did you use?
would you like to share the video here?

[3di]

:) i7-7700k 32 gb ddr4 , i7930 overclocked to 4ghz 24 gb ddr3, and two quad core xeons 16gb ddr3 and 8gb ddr3.  Can't share the animation unfortunately, it's an old job still under NDA.

Not the most amazing setup, but I'd probably have to spend around 6k to match the £400 1070.

[Christa Noel]

afaik they corona will employ the power of gpu only for .. kind of features accelerations not for rendering engine.
example: Accelerate bloom glare process in VFB post pro.
but who knows? everything seems more possible after the corona joins the chaosGroup

[3di]

Yeah I hope so, I'd hate to leave corona behind after using it for so long.  Can't argue with a £5500 saving in hardware though.....and that's if I only want to match one 1070!

[Juraj]

I also rate you highly for creative writing :- )

Personally I haven't seen any speed benefits in F-Storm from those who actually use it to render complex interiors like our favourite swedish boy duo.

That's not to detract from you gpu request, I personally hope that could eventually be viable upgrade at some time, after all, I am looking at those 16-24gb GPUs to become mainstream next year :- ).
GPU accelerated Framebuffer with Denosing/Bloom&Glare/etc.. will be fantastic start.

[3di]

Yeah, and with nvlink hopefully coming to GeForce cards next year 2 x 8gb cards will equal 16gb video ram instead of 8gb.   AMD vega 64 cards can also treat system ram or ssd as gpu ram at the moment too thanks to their new infinite fabric technology.

I must admit I haven't tested with an interior scene yet, but heavy refraction and outdoor scenes were MASSIVELY faster.  When I let that bad boy rip it was a similar feeling to  watching a game load almost instantly from a sega  master system cartridge after years of watching the ocean loading screen on the trusty c64 :)

[Juraj]

Exterior were always blazing, 6 years ago I remember them being almost instant with first alpha of Octane on old GTX 285 with 2GB of memory. Hence the tradition from which the "rotating Car on youtube" Meme came :- )

And interiors took endless, up to 100times more to clean-up ('clean' is the essential part). Seems like that didn't change much since then.

[3di]

Damn it, I'm going to have to pause my box set binge now to go and compare interior scenes :)

[3di]

I don't normally do interiors so the quality isn't the best, just an old scene I downloaded from a free site ages ago and slightly modified/set up for corona.  It has a forest pack rug, and mainly transluscent materials for shades/curtains with a bit of scattering if I remember correctly.

I've set it to render at 1920x1080p with a noise level limit of 1.5% and rendered in corona on 4 machines (dr), then i've changed the renderer to Fstorm, hit the convert scene button, changed the hdri bitmap gamma to 2.2 and enabled direct lighting and then hit "run rt mode" using 1x gtx1070.....oh I also tweaked the lamp shade material a little as it was too see through in Fstorm initially (I may have gone a little too far though as i've robbed the fstorm render of quite a bit of the yellow light.

On corona, I waited until the time remaining had stabilised and was ticking down consistently, but on Fstorm I let it run all the way through to 1.5% noise due to it's time remaining not being as accurate as corona's as it constantly decreases as it renders.

Results attached.  Fstorm was still suprisingly favourable still coming in not quite as quick as the outdoor scenes, but still approx 8 times faster.  So I definitely think corona should seriously consider having a change of heart on their cpu only stance...with their expertise and team size i'm sure they could match what one guy has been able to do on his own with fstorm.

[cecofuli]

For a serious comparative, you should use the same light setup. Also, don't use any converter, but convert by hand with the better setup.

If you want to try, this is my old test, converted by me, from FStorm file to Corona 1.3 (yes, I should try with the new Corona v1.7) .
n
--- LINK---

If you look the 18 minutes FStorm test (Titan X + GTX980Ti) and my test  with very old i7 970 six core, (15 minutes)  Corona wins.
Why? Because with less rendering time and with very old CPU I have more or less the same quality or, even, better quality than an expensive dual GPU rendering.
Of course, we should try with the new version of Fstorm and Corona v1.7. Also the Fstorm original rendering ( I found it in the FStorm forum) was in JPG and not in PNG.

But, I'm very curious to see a test with two rig with the same price. For example, a new 1000 GPU (two GTX 1070) with new 1000 CPU (ThreadRipper 1950X) with the last version of both softwares.

PS: remember that in Corona v1.3 there weren't any bloom or glare.

[andrewdtejeda]

For a serious comparative, you should use the same light setup. Also, don't use any converter, but convert by hand with the better setup.

If you want to try, this is my old test, converted by me, from FStorm file to Corona 1.3 (yes, I should try with the new Coroa v1.7) .

--- LINK---

If you look the 18 minutes FStorm test (Titan X + GTX980Ti) and my test  with very old 7 970 six core, (15 minutes)  Corona wins.
Why? Because with less rendering time and with very old CPU I have more or less the same quality or, even, better quality than an expensive dual GPU rendering.
Of course, we should try with the new version of Fstorm and Corona v1.7. Also the Fstorm original rendering ( I found it in the FStorm forum) was in JPG and not in PNG.

But, I'm very curious to see a test with two rig with the same price. For example, a new 700 GPU with new 700 CPUm with the last version of both softwares.

PS: remember that in Corona v1.3 there weren't any bloom or glare.

If you can, I would really like to see a comparison with the newest version of fstorm and the newest version of corona. My studio may be making a render engine change soon and this would be very helpful in the decision making process.

Thank you!

[cecofuli]

You can do by yourself!
I'm my original thread, you can download the FStom .max file and the Corona .max file.

--- LINK---

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_i7C0g1XqRMN1lodFNUb1d5REk

I'm not FStom user, sorry. I used the FStom DEMO version, one year ago.

If you will do the test, please, post the result ;-)

[3di]

Hi Cecofuli, your quite right.  I hadnt noticed but the hdri, although the same one, it was automatically flipped 180 degrees during the conversion process so the light is streaming into the room from a different direction.  I'll retry and see how the result varies.  I'm using 1.1.10v by the way.

[andrewdtejeda]

You can do by yourself!
I'm my original thread, you can download the FStom .max file and the Corona .max file.

--- LINK---

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_i7C0g1XqRMN1lodFNUb1d5REk

I'm not FStom user, sorry. I used the FStom DEMO version, one year ago.

If you will do the test, please, post the result ;-)

Ahh, I had hoped you were.  Neither are we, and we don't have access to the newest version of it. Maybe someday, once it's available, I can take a whack at it.