CUDA rendering speed Cloud vs. Local

[terence_ziegler]

Hello all,

This morning, I did a CUDA test render of a Houdini scene. I was surprised that the cloud was slower than my workstation. Isn't the point of the Cloud rendering option that it's much faster?

The scene is a simple Houdini particle animation.

My workstation specs: Threadripper 3970x and 2x2080Ti. Time to render 24 frames: 39 minutes.
Cloud render: 45 minutes.

I'm not sure why to use the Cloud service, as that's a very slow time.

Thoughts?

Terence

[ivaylocg]

Hello,

Thank you for sharing your experience - we understand your concerns regarding the performance difference between your workstation and the cloud rendering service.

After analyzing the rendering times, I see that the slowest frame was rendered in 45 minutes (some frames rendered much faster than that). This delay was primarily due to a shortage of GPUs at the external cloud provider we use. In the current AI age, GPU shortages are becoming more common as the demand for high-performance computing resources increases.

To mitigate such issues one option is to use CPU rendering as an alternative. Also there is CUDA CPU override, which will still use the CUDA render engine but on CPU. CPUs can provide more consistent availability and performance, especially during peak times when GPU resources are heavily in demand.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

[terence_ziegler]

Thanks for getting back to me.

How does one use the "CUDA CPU override"? My project was already set up to use CUDA rendering.

T

[ivaylocg]

When you submit a GPU job one of the options during the submit should be CUDA CPU Override:
https://docs.chaos.com/display/VCLOU...loud#Submittin gJobstoRenderinChaosCloud-RenderEngineOverrides

[terence_ziegler]

This really makes absolutely no sense. The CPU override feature clearly states that it may "take significantly longer time to complete rendering." So the solution you're offering is to have LONGER render times for the same cost and far slower than a workstation?

[ivaylocg]

The message states that the CPU override feature may take more time, but this is not a certainty. If you are okay with sharing your scene, please send it to https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new. We will test whether CUDA CPU is actually slower than GPU on the cloud machines in your specific case. Testing the actual scene is the only way you can get a definitive answer.