I think I am done with GPU

[Morbid Angel]

That's the thing though Manuel, how do you know when you start a project that it will fit into the vram? You almost always never know. Unless you do some isolated product renders or whatever. If you commit to a gpu farm, then need to upgrade it then what? I have a farm I've upgraded it 3 times over past 5 years. I just went out and bought 2 TB of DDR3 ram spread across the farm its 96 GB per node, and some got 128 GB. All because last several projects I had hard time rendering with 48 GB of ram! If I ever went the gpu route it would doom project after project for me, I would go under as a vfx vendor by now.

[squintnic]

Yep we are about to reinvest in CPU power for our arch vis farm which has currently got 2.9Thz of capacity and the majority of nodes with 128Gb RAM
GPU still way too dangerous to use for arch vis / infrastructure vis (90% of our business) given the scale of scenes are often huge.

The small scenes where it fits into VRAM GPU be really fast but often these scenes get added together to make large long and heavy sequences that could be comped but brute forcem often ends up cheaper in terms of person hours vs compositing GPU passes

[danio]

Following up on my post from this morning, I just converted the 'this one is for sure going to be Next GPU' scene to Corona Ran out of VRam, ran into random Cuda 700 errors, and also ended up liking the Corona images better. I do have an NVlink on the way for future projects. I'm really curious about the Optix 7 build.

All that said, my journey back to Corona was super smooth. The Corona converter works so well it's crazy. I think the Vray converter could use an update. Not sure why, but the translucency and refraction also always sells me more with Corona, too. I've been dragged over the coals for saying that but I see it time and again. I did a blind sample with my wife and she picked the Corona images 3 for 3. Same LUT, same everything. I think the noise pattern with Corona is also more believable. Less weird shoji screen haze, more expected noise.

I could actually see a workflow where I do a lot of Forest Pack work for scene setup with VRay Next since it is so much faster with iToo and IPR, and then convert over to Corona for final production.

Anyway, my personal experience from the last couple of days that seems somehow related to this thread's tangent.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

The thing is, I'm not talking about vram problems exclusively, although obviously it's difficult. But my scenes right now always fit into my now nvlinked rtx 2080ti. Sure, of a scene doesn't and vray doesn't like it, nothing works anymore and that sucks. The workaround with isn't DR with only the local machine is very slow when it comes to projects with lots of textures and geometry.
it's the instability and crashes I'm really angered with.
i don't have money for a render farm right now btw. So GPU was the best option for speed.

On a side note, I converted an interior archviz scene to Corona and started the IPR. It was so slow, I think it was even slowing down my pc, that I stopped it. It was my first attempt to Corona though, so it probably doesn't say much. But that's for another thread and totally different forum...

[kosso_olli]

On a side note, I converted an interior archviz scene to Corona and started the IPR. It was so slow, I think it was even slowing down my pc, that I stopped it. It was my first attempt to Corona though, so it probably doesn't say much..

There is a whole discussion regarding this issue over at the Corona forums. Seems like it is the norm these days: https://corona-renderer.com/forum/in...?topic=25217.0


I am quite satisfied with the speed of V-Ray IPR. It is reasonably fast, even on complex scenes. But still, there is always room for improvement

[stevesideas]

Me and my colleague have been working on a project over the last few days and I think, whilst using interactive mode our machines have crashed more than 40 times each. We both have the latest updates of vray and using the latest version of max 2019. It is very frustrating I have to say!

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

What kind of Project is that? Heavy geometry? Lots of textures and materials?

[kosso_olli]

ForestPack in the scene? For us this is the most unstable part of our 3d software.

[LeePuznowski]

I'm mostly working in television (infomercials) and moved to GPU rendering a few years ago. Starting with Iray and a few Geforce 780 cards. We currently have a small GPU farm with 14 Titan Xs. From my experience, GPU rendering has steadily improved since then. Although, stability has often been an issue. I've learned to work around most issues but still do have problems with motion blur. It has caused me the most problems with Vray NEXT GPU. Random CUDA errors with network rendering are also the norm.

[NorthVisualStudio]

I've been using GPU for production projects for a year and can't complain, including heavy use of forest pack. There are a few issues for example the Affects Channels option for materials doesn't work and the bump works differently between GPU and CPU.

Manuel, if you have any scenes that you want a second opinion on, I would be happy to have a look and see how they behave on my machine.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

But I noticed more bugs and that I had to restart Max more often if vray crashed - and it does crash more often than with CPU. But going into archviz ... boy, am I experiencing unstability to a level I never have with Vray.
I now have the habit of opening two or three 3ds max instances at the same time so that when vray gets another one of those "unhandled exceptions" or error 700 or whatever, I wouldnt need to wait to restart and load everything. I am frequently switching to nightlies and newest stable versions to see if things are improving, and sometimes they do, but they do not really.

I've been using GPU in production since 3.6 ,it is been working nicely for us
I use Vray GPU in Modo, Maya and Houdini. I have never had any of these issues
You probably should stick to one stable nightly that works best for you, and stick to a stable Nvidia driver like 430.97 and uninstall Geforce experience app
And probably disable windows update. If you get a 700 error, feel free to report that to support and follow up with them on when this gets solved or how to prevent it from happening

I sometimes have scenes where suddenly everything goes downhill and nothing would render anymore, or rather sometimes even: IPR works, but production doesnt.

Again, never got this kind of behavior, Did you send a file to support, to see what is going on?
Even with files going back to Vray 3.6 never had an issue

I have the feeling that GPUs are an unstable thing altogether.

This is not the case, many people and studios are relying heavily on GPU rendering now.. not just Vray GPU but Octane and Redshift

I really think you shouldn't give up on GPU rendering yet, maybe take a break from Vray.. Give Fstorm or Redshift a shot.. See if they are any more stable than Vray for you
Or you probably should invest time into reporting some of these issues, support guys will go as far as remoting in to figure out what is going on

Best,
Muhammed

[Micha]

I'm using GPU rendering at V-ray for Rhino since a few weeks now and I must say, I quite happy - I don't have seen any crash at the last nightly and speed/quality of my 2x2080ti + 1x1080ti makes me happy. I like the possibility to upgrade my hardware by changing/adding graphic cards only, without to reinstall any software.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Like what Micha said, I suspect some of the issues you guys described are specific to the Max plugin?
I use Vray GPU in Maya/Modo in production and now Houdini for testing, the Cuda engine doesn't require any restarts, and I don't get any crashes.

[matanov]

Scenes, scenes, scenes ... send us scenes. I really don't remember a case where somebody reported a crash and it wasn't fixed right away.

[Micha]

MANUEL_MOUSIOL I did a little test to get an impression what can be expected by CPU vs GPU and both together. I think, GPU allow you to get a lot of power quite easy. I think, GPU rendering will have a bright future. I'm curious for the RTX support and the speed increase.

https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...ode-speed-test