I think I am done with GPU

[glorybound]

It is a hit/miss for me, too. I just did an interior with GPU and it went great. So great I almost purchased a second Titan.

[zero-13]

I guess I was just trying to convey how GPU rendering being unstable in my experience is sometimes it's the GPU render engine, sometimes it's an Nvidia driver.

I have had issues with Redshift or V-Ray not working at all due to a newer drivers (never in unison) and having to revert to an older driver, several times, so many times that I guess I have accepted that GPU rendering is not anywhere near as stable as CPU and might not ever be. (Why yes I have been called Captain Obvious a time or two! )

But I also wanted to give a bit of a positive spin, in that V-Ray CPU is a nice backup, IF you are fortunate enough to have decent or GPU comparable CPU compute power, where as with other GPU only render engines would leave you totally out in the wind in such a scenario.

I know we all definitely want better and more stable GPU rendering, but GPUs being constantly mutable and evolving components, maybe there is no such thing in the immediate term.

Can you Imagine me as a counselor, I'd be like a non helpful sadness factory... reading through my responses, perhaps I've already accomplished this sans the "counselor" moniker lol

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

You guys are cracking me up
I am saying that I have a lot of problems with GPU and a lot of answers are that they dont have problem and that is very stable. It is good to hear, but it differs from my experience. Maybe I should work on your PCs on your projects
Anyway, my latest archviz project didnt have any problems so far except for the occasional vram insufficiencies. Using on of the latest nightlies. I will stick to GPU for a little while longer. This gave me a little bit of hope.

I am always trying to send as many scenes as possible, as I said. But time is restricted and bugs that I cannot reproduce have little chance of getting fixed in my opinion. That is the hardest part for me - sometimes vray is quirky and is giving me a hard time, but getting it to be reproducable can be difficult sometimes and that is frustrating, because a lot of time I cannot put my finger on the actual problem

[zero-13]

I agree GPU can be sometimes frustratingly weird, it's been much better the last few releases. In V-Ray's defense I think the majority of the "issues" stems from GPU architecture in general, emphasis on the I think part.

The thing I love most about V-Ray in it's current state is the ability to instantly switch back to the ultra robust and stable CPU engine with very little setup, if GPU is not doing what I want or if Nvidia drivers are being goofy.

Not many other render engines have that flexibility and it has saved me more than once not being locked into GPU.

When I get to the point of configuring my next workstation, instead of going all in on GPU compute or CPU compute, I'm going to try my best to get the most I can of both, to give myself that flexibility.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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]

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

[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.

[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.

[kosso_olli]

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

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

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

[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!

[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