Evaluating GPU Rendering and Finding Documentation?

[biochemical_animations]

I'm interested in GPU rendering for the speed it gives and am looking at other renderers progress like Redshift, FStorm, or Octane. However, I have thus far chosen to invest in VRay because of it's longevity and support.

In trying to decide what GPU renderer to use, I was wondering with VRayRT if the documentation of supported features it up to date. For example, I need to use VRayEdgesTex on some models given to me and referencing the VRayRT supported features for both CPU and GPU rendering it states VRayEdges (I'm assuming that is the same as VRayEdgesTex) is not supported under GPU, but is for CPU. Now, in testing, I've found it to work for GPU. Great! And one could say, "why not just test it to see if it works." Well, the problem with that is maybe something is supposed to work but doesn't for some reason, I have to spend time trying to find what setting to adjust to make it work, or find some other "needle in the haystack," whether it be a bug or conflict, or what?

If the documentation was up to date, this would be a big time saver, as I could better decide where to spend my time...either researching the fix to make it work, or decide to use a different renderer with those supported features.

So my question is, is the VRayRT CPU and GPU link up to date? If not, can Chaos Group make and keep it up to date?

I love VRay and will stick with it if I can, but the progress of GPU rendering and what I need to give my clients steers where my loyalities lie.

[savage309]

I
So my question is, is the VRayRT CPU and GPU link up to date? If not, can Chaos Group make and keep it up to date?

Hey, thanks for getting in touch. The documentation is usually up to date.
Unfortunately it happens that we could have missed something somewhere, in which case we are going to fix it. That particular one that you have found is one that we have missed - the reason for that is that the edges tex few modes (like, it can show you the edges of the triangles (which we don't support on the GPU) or do a rounded edges effect, which we support). We will fix that right away, thanks for the pointer.

If you have any other troubles, just let us know.

Thanks,
Best,
Blago.

[Ivan1982]

Hi, we switched to GPU in production.

It is fast and scales nicely with more GPU's, it is often faster than other GPU render engines and sometimes slower "por una cabeza" .

Some things are not supported, some of them will be and some of them already working nice. Same as any other GPU render rt_Gpu have it's limitations, it can be frustrating at times but you will overcome all those issues as you get used to it or work around them.

8gb per gpu is enough for about 95% of things we are working on, we crammed city inside 8gb.

However you will need to take some extra care when you build your scene since you do not have 64 or 128 gigs of ram like when using CPU, but you get used to it.

Most plug-ins such forest pack pro working nice.

One big advantage is Distributed rendering, and no matter how fast your machine is it's never fast enough, so using 10-12 gpu's is always nice when you need 5k render in 15 minutes.

Take care