Anyone using a Titan X or 1080TI out there in CarraraLand?
UnifiedBrain
Posts: 3,588
The goal is to render faster in Octane (mainly) and IRAY (possibly).
Due to the new lower pricing structure of the 1080 line, some good looking used 980TI's and Titan X's (mostly Maxwell) are starting to enter the market, as gamers and workstation folks are looking to upgrade.
A couple of times, I've seen two Titans for sale for less than the price of a single 1080TI ($700 US).
Does anyone have any experience with Titans, or know the potential value of using two in a single Carrara machine? How would that compare to using a 1080TI?
Thanks!
Post edited by UnifiedBrain on
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no sorry, interesting question though
Once, I had a GeForce GTX 970. I didn't think it was fast enough. So I bought a GeForce GTX 980Ti, and I added it, thinking the rendering would go faster. It didn't.
OK, thanks. Argus, if I remember right, the 970 was considered a pretty good card. But I'm still surprised that you didn't notice any difference with the 980TI.
I'm hoping that PhilW (Mr Octane) and Jon Stark (Mr Xeon) see this thread and comment. And other folks, of course.
Okay, I have a double-socket motherboard with 2 Xeon CPUs, which allows me to render with 24 nodes. So it goes pretty fast when I render with Carrara s native renderer. But when I use Octane, even with 2 nVidia GTX video cards, it all become slower. I know that they tell you on their site that nVidia cards are fast, fast, fast... because they use the GPU. But that s BS, with my setup. Now I don t know about the GTX 1080Ti. That could be different. AFAIK, with my setup, everything rendered with Octane and the GPU generally is SLOWER. But, OTOH, the results are SO much better!
Thanks Argus. OK, I think that you are saying that rendering with an nVidia card in Octane is slower than using your dual xeon CPU in the Carrara native renderer. That sounds right to me, based on everything I have read so far. I'm eyeing a dual xeon setup in the near future, as discussed in this thread.
But right now, optimizing for Octane or IRAY is the goal. I don't expect dual xeon speed, but I figure that a dual Titan setup would be faster than most GPU alternatives.
I've seen your request and am commenting! But I can't help I'm afraid - I use a GTX 960M on a laptop. More speed would always be nice, but I'm not in the market for upgrading yet and I am no hardware expert.
I started out with a GTX 980 which was great and really fast in Octane. A year later I added the GTX 1080 and I'm getting about 3 times the performance of the GTX 980 alone.
With both cards running this was rendered at 1920 by 1080 with each frame taking about 8 seconds to complete:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bo6NgXuHUE
Video shows as unavailable for me. Also waht Samples per Pixel did you use and which render kernel? Those can have big influences on render times.
Thanks Phil! I guess if you don't feel the need to upgrade, then the 960 is fast enough for you. I'm a little surprised. How long did that last render (Genesis 2 with the HDRI) take? It looked fantastic, btw.
The video works for me fine. It is that awesome Michael 4 animation that he posted before.
Thanks for that input, stringtheory9!
Odd - tried the video again and it worked this time - looks very realistic!
I didn't note the exact render time, think it was somewhere between 15 and 30 mins. Obviously I would love to have that slashed, but for that quality I am prepared to wait - after all I used to render overnight for a couple of geometric shapes when I first started in 3D!
Thanks Phil.
I went back and updated the link with the non mobile URL. I actually got mixed up with another render I did at that time. Render time on this was 30 seconds a frame. I don't rememeber all the numbers but I'll run the render when I get home and post the details.
It looks a very impressive result for 30 secs per frame!
Thanks Phil.
I did some screen captures to highlight actual numbers. These are direct lighting renders. To cut down on render times I rendered an exr (HDRI) image for the background using the spherical camera in the final render camera position. As such an A/B test between direct lighting and PMC (or Pathtracing) showed very little difference. Not enough to matter for animation.
So the actual elements in the scene are the M4 figure and dynamic hair and two bulbs; one on each side of the figure.
UnifiedBrain, while these are not done with either a Titan X or a 1080TI it should be failry easy to interpolate how those cards will performe based on the sceen captures and renders specs below.
The GTX 980 with a 200 s/px stop @ 16.58 Ms/sec took 29 seconds to render one frame at 1920 by 1080
The GTX 1080 with a 200 s/px stop @ 24.04 Ms/sec took 18 seconds to render one frame at 1920 by 1080
Both cards with a 200 s/px stop @ 41.28 Ms/sec took 11 seconds to render one frame at 1920 by 1080
I just got a piddly GT640 so I have no idea
must think about an upgrade one day......
I use GTX 960 on my Windows. It's powerful enough to compare with my previous graphics card. It takes me about 20 min to octane render this image with all those emissive and glossy surfaces, several bulb lights and a lot of geometry.
This one is a skin test, took 5 mins, I could probably have stopped it a little earlier - this is using PMC though which you need for SSS.
Phil, beautiful skin. Is it octane shader or the native one? I need to dig into the skin settings.
Stringtheory9 - great practical information in those comparisons, thanks! Does Octane automatically recognize and add together your different cards, or do you need something special to get a multi-card setup to work?
Stezza - I only have a 460. But I don't think that will slice tomatoes very well in Octane, hence the need to upgrade.
Yyusur - Thanks for the render time - similar to Phil's card and experience. Nice image! You are getting very good in Octane.
Phil - what is PMC?
I use my own formula for skin in Octane that is the result of many, many tests. I wish there was a way to press a button and convert a Carrara skin into my Octane defined materials (if there are any plugin writers out there reading this!). There tends to be some fine tuning required for each set of maps, as things like bump maps can be different strengths, and darker skin needs different settings for the SSS component than paler skin.
UB - Octane has several different render kernels that it can use - Direct Lighting is fast but is not photorealistic (but can look very good) - it is in some ways similar to using the Ambient Occlusion mode in Carrara's renderer, and doesn't render things like SSS (sub-surface scattering). There are two "photoreal" kernals - Path Tracing and PMC (Population Monte Carlo, based on the type of sampling used) so given enough time, they should both converge on the same image. Path Tracing tends to be quicker in simpler lighting cases, and PMC tends to be quicker to resolve an image with complex lighting with a lot of caustics for example. I used PMC here as the Path Tracing was causing a lot of "fireflies", I think due to the SSS. Each of them is useful at times, so I'm glad to have the choice!
Talking about Octane, I went to OTOY site today, looking for the Octane plugin for Carrara manual. I have only version 2. There used to be a manual. It s not there anymore. What is there instead is a description of version 3 new features. How to get Octane plugin for Carrara manual?
I have 2 Titan X. It works great with octane. I haven't made comparisons/tests, though. The only other configuration I've used with octane is ... one Titan X :-) . And it's very logically (and rather precisely) twice as fast with two.
I purchased the 2nd one a few months before the 1080 was available. I think I would have rather taken that one. But I'm extremely happy with my Titans. Really great cards.
Perhaps you'd get a better answer there: https://render.otoy.com/forum then "Plugin discussion/support" and "Carrara"
There's also a benchmark: https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php
Go to that page: https://docs.otoy.com/Octane_Render_Portal_Page_HTML5/Home.htm
I let you guess which button to click there ;-)
Thanks for sharing your hands-on experience, Khris! Really appreciate it.
My window for getting two Titan X's has passed, and I didn't buy. Just not the perfect deal yet. But I'm sure that it will open again, as the new nVidia pricing is making older cards less desirable and more affordable.
Then again, I have seen one or two barely used 1080 TI's offered for sale at $600. Another deal like that may be too tempting to pass up.
I've been there. There's no manual there. There's only a description of Octane version 3 new features.
You're right. Sorry. There's only v3.
I've tried google search. It found links that seemed interesting ("v2 otoy documentation' for example) but I always end up on the same page ... with nothing about the V2.
Have you tried asking on the otoy forum ?
I do a lot of guessing and experimenting myself.
The volumetric clouds in 3 especially puzzle me, sometimes they work as expected other times not so much.
It does not seem to be related to the kernel either as have had quite good results in direct lighting.
Replicating them it gets even more unpredictable, they work replicated but sometimes not.
often hair too, it seems to need to be saved after a sim even if just to the browser and reloaded and Octane restarted or it will not update.
Animated that is.
Kris205, Thanks for your help.
I went to the Octane forums, and somebody uploaded his own copy of the manual of Octane plugin version 2 for Carrara.
Here's what Sighman had to say: "I'm sorry but it looks like OTOY has changed the documentation system (again) and have lost all the V2 documentation (which contained the majority of the docs)".
That explains it.
Thank you for the information.