Corona GPU

[dfcorona]

You guys are doing some amazing stuff with Corona. The speed is really incredible.  I am really looking forward to seeing a GPU version.  With GPU's getting so fast now and the capability of having multiple and easy and cheap upgrades, it truly will be a great package.  Right now I'm using Vray RT on one Titan X, and the interactivity and render speed is incredible.  Corona already has such great speed I would love to see it's capability on GPU.  I read back some time that Corona has partnered with AMD for FireRender.  What is the news on this?  It's especially interesting since the Just released there Fury X2 GPU.

[Lucutus]

As far as i know Corona will never be GPU based.

Greetz

Lucutus

[dfcorona]

As far as i know Corona will never be GPU based.

Greetz

Lucutus

I read about it off there own blog, a collaboration between corona and AMD.  I hope they are creating a GPU version, it will be years before we have a good increase in CPU power. GPU increases year over year, and is already way faster than CPU and cheaper.

[Lucutus]

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,69.msg282.html#msg282

This statement from Ondra sounds quite clear to me.....but i dont know if it is maybe "outdated".

Greetz

Lucutus

[juang3d]

What you heard was about a different render engine the team is working on in conjunction with AMD (so OpenCL I presume) but it's not Corona, I hope we never see the GPU's involved with Corona but the CPU's kicking the GPU's asses hahaha

Cheers.

[maru]

GPU answer: https://corona-renderer.com/features/proudly-cpu-based/

As far as i know Corona will never be GPU based.

Greetz

Lucutus

I read about it off there own blog, a collaboration between corona and AMD.  I hope they are creating a GPU version, it will be years before we have a good increase in CPU power. GPU increases year over year, and is already way faster than CPU and cheaper.

Dfcorona, you clearly misunderstood the blog entry although it was very clearly written to prevent speculations like this.
See: https://corona-renderer.com/blog/render-legion-and-amd-announce-cooperation/

1.:

Is FireRender a “Corona GPU” or “Corona RT”?

No. Those are two separate render engines, developed by two separate companies, where  FireRender shares some Corona’s technology. For example FireRender is able to directly render Corona materials and lights.

2.:

Do you plan Corona GPU?

No, not any time soon. But we want to keep staying in touch with the latest development. At the moment CPU is still the preferred option for us.

[Ondra]

We are observing GPU renderer development, but we are not developing GPU renderer. And we do not plan to do it unless some game-changer GPU architecture appears

[agentdark45]

We are observing GPU renderer development, but we are not developing GPU renderer. And we do not plan to do it unless some game-changer GPU architecture appears

What about Nvidia's Pascal line of GPU's which promise to be orders of times faster than today GPU's? DirectX 12 also promises to allow multiple GPU's to pool their memory. GPU power advances are happening a lot quicker than with CPU's, which will remain relatively stagnant for the foreseeable future (at least at the consumer level, or Intel decide to give us a 4ghz capable 12+ core consumer chip).

I've got two 12gb Titan X's in my rendering machine, with DX12 that will mean 24gb of GPU memory will be available. It seems a waste to not have the GPU's contributing to my renders in some some of GPU+CPU hybrid rendering mode. I think most users here would appreciate any rendering speed bump they could get!

[kurantransfer]

Before using Corona, I was using Arion and Octane Render to some extent. They both produce good results but when it comes to efficiency per terms of heat and power consumption my machine would seem to burn when it pushed the boundries of my Titan GPU. I was afraid to put it on a render job for an overnight. ( But the main problems of these renderers in my opinion is there 3dsmax integration. As far as I remember, they did not support more than one uvw channel for example and the procedural maps of max although they had their own kind- Corona's biggest plus effect is its complete max integration. And again in my opinion I was feeling guilty for spending my wallet over nvidia every two years for a display card with more memory (not a faster gpu).
But again, I believe that having some kind of gpu integration would be fine even it can be optional.

[Ondra]

We dont need faster, we need more flexible/easier to develop for ;)

[dfcorona]

Not sure of the heat issues you are having, sounds like a bad hardware setup. Gpu Rendering has come a long way, I know some complain that gpu rendering doesn't support all features, well neither did cpu rendering when it first came out. I remember using some of the first Corona betas, they where missing quite a lot.  Gpu rendering is no longer in it's infancy, we can work on full production with GPU now.  Even some GPU renderers like Moskito claim to support all features of Max, including all shaders. I have not used that one, but using Octane + Vray RT I can tell you I am not running into any issues on large scenes.  There is a reason why all rendering engines are turning to GPU, and I would hate to see a great GPU renderer like Corona miss it's chance.  CPU's are gaining no ground it terms of performance, there is a tiny increase each year for tons of money.  Now that GPU's have huge amounts of ram and are increasing it speed by incredible rates there is no competition in terms of which platform is really moving forward.  I have tested GPU renderers vs Coronas CPU rendering, Corona does impress in speed for how fast it is on CPU, but doesn't hold a candle to GPU. I see some saying I hope they never make it for GPU, I cannot see any logic in that thinking, why not? why not just to have the option?

[dfcorona]

We dont need faster, we need more flexible/easier to develop for ;)

Tell that to people who are sick of waiting for renders, and sick of paying tons to renderfarms.

[juang3d]

I would prefer to see corona improved in the CPU side of things, I'll just say this.

Cheers!

[dfcorona]

Why not both, there a growing company.

[agentdark45]

Not sure of the heat issues you are having, sounds like a bad hardware setup. Gpu Rendering has come a long way, I know some complain that gpu rendering doesn't support all features, well neither did cpu rendering when it first came out. I remember using some of the first Corona betas, they where missing quite a lot.  Gpu rendering is no longer in it's infancy, we can work on full production with GPU now.  Even some GPU renderers like Moskito claim to support all features of Max, including all shaders. I have not used that one, but using Octane + Vray RT I can tell you I am not running into any issues on large scenes.  There is a reason why all rendering engines are turning to GPU, and I would hate to see a great GPU renderer like Corona miss it's chance.  CPU's are gaining no ground it terms of performance, there is a tiny increase each year for tons of money.  Now that GPU's have huge amounts of ram and are increasing it speed by incredible rates there is no competition in terms of which platform is really moving forward.  I have tested GPU renderers vs Coronas CPU rendering, Corona does impress in speed for how fast it is on CPU, but doesn't hold a candle to GPU. I see some saying I hope they never make it for GPU, I cannot see any logic in that thinking, why not? why not just to have the option?

This.

I'm not fully in agreement that a fully GPU renderer would be hands down better than a CPU renderer, but we should have the option to utilise a computer's full performance. Seems a waste of resources not to. Out of core rendering also gets around GPU ram limits.

I'm pretty sure my SLI Titan X's could seriously cut some render time. And yes, speed is a huge factor for me. Why wait 8 hours for a render when I could get it done in 4 hours? This can mean the difference between meeting a deadline and not.

There seems to be a large number of paying Corona users (myself included) that want GPU + CPU rendering to happen. It would be interesting to see some performance numbers on GPU vs CPU rendering times for various setups.

Interesting fact, my Titan X's have a combined 14 teraflops of single precision compute power going to waste, whilst a 5960x only has around 700 Gigaflops single precision ;)