Are we out of touch that much?

[oglu]

With heavy scenes CPU is still the way to go. A Threadripper with 128gb of ram does eat everthing. GPU only will take some more years to cook. If you have to render a lot of unique geo with displacement, hair and VDBs on top a GPU system with enough ram wont be cheap + does eat a lot of energy.

[NorthVisualStudio]

Being able to render the alpha though transparent objects is the biggest one for me - I flagged this a long time ago.

Crypto matte render elements and Caustics renderability.

[seandunderdale]

I used Vray CPU for 10yrs ish, then had to use GPU for 6 months, and now back in CPU, and Im so glad. There were so many little things that kept tripping me up...the way textures repeated / or didnt. Projections behaving differently, or auto exposure needing weird workarounds to behave. I lost so much time trying to figure out how to get the results I wanted that any render time saved meant nothing. Back on CPU and generally I get the results I expect by using "normal" Vray workflows.

[Morbid Angel]

You know guys there is a thing here for year which I don't understand...


Are you serious? You cant let go of the past, and reluctant to use any new technology? and you are not even my grandparents..

So just to be clear - cpu rendering is not going away any time soon. With cpus like threadripper 3, 64 core 128 thread and new ones on horizon cpu rendering will be quite a match to the gpu. Additionally the RAM limitation already mentioned. Maybe for you, working on simpler scenes whatever ram you have 8 GB, 12 GB, is enough.

On larger projects which is a fair amount of studios work on including my own, you cannot even do a project with 48GB of ram. Majority of projects for us run at over 90GB of ram, often 100 GB or more.

I just finished a project where I could not have 2 3ds max scenes open at once each taking over 80GB of ram, totaling 160GB of ram at once.

Now that we put this issue to rest about the gpu. I've used redshift in production and its by no means a miracle render, its got a ton of its own issues. As Vlado already mentioned its a lot harder to write stuff for gpu then cpu.

I also wish gpu was more developed, but I clearly see that cpu is a very viable render option for its versatility.

[Dini009]

So just to be clear - cpu rendering is not going away any time soon. With cpus like threadripper 3, 64 core 128 thread and new ones on horizon cpu rendering will be quite a match to the gpu. Additionally the RAM limitation already mentioned. Maybe for you, working on simpler scenes whatever ram you have 8 GB, 12 GB, is enough.

On larger projects which is a fair amount of studios work on including my own, you cannot even do a project with 48GB of ram. Majority of projects for us run at over 90GB of ram, often 100 GB or more.

I just finished a project where I could not have 2 3ds max scenes open at once each taking over 80GB of ram, totaling 160GB of ram at once.

Now that we put this issue to rest about the gpu. I've used redshift in production and its by no means a miracle render, its got a ton of its own issues. As Vlado already mentioned its a lot harder to write stuff for gpu then cpu.

I also wish gpu was more developed, but I clearly see that cpu is a very viable render option for its versatility.

I understand now. The memory problem possibility never really occurred to me. We are a small company dont ever really have larger scenes, just small 3d stuff, maybe sometimes a room, a product, that kinda stuff. I can also imagine that not everyone uses vray for super large scale work. Also, amazing showreel!

Still I dont really want to invest into cpu any more, even if I purchase the most badass threadripper, it wont live up to my other graphics cards. Its so fast for me its super convenient. Also the hybrid mode uses my cpus.. cant imagine why in gpu rendering cannot use my normal ddr rams for rendering but that just because I dont know anything about coding.

Thanks for the answer, it helped me clear it up a bit.

[Dini009]

I used Vray CPU for 10yrs ish, then had to use GPU for 6 months, and now back in CPU, and Im so glad. There were so many little things that kept tripping me up...the way textures repeated / or didnt. Projections behaving differently, or auto exposure needing weird workarounds to behave. I lost so much time trying to figure out how to get the results I wanted that any render time saved meant nothing. Back on CPU and generally I get the results I expect by using "normal" Vray workflows.

Well I've got use to it, but if you finally figure it out it can be way faster. The one thing that bother me all the little things.

[piotrus3333]

please realise that VRay GPU in reality is a freebe added to purchase of the real thing. damn good freebe but still.
I’m back on gpu after few years (back in VRay 3) and the main problem is simply very spotty documentation. feature list is hidden somewhere between official “supported features”, messages in the log and bugs most of which should be finally acknowledged as unsupported features after being few years old.
recently I’ve seen a topic (gpu realated question) that is fairly clear proof that even chaos does not have a list of what works in VRay GPU and what does not.
this is imo the most pressing issue with GPU - I bet most users would appreciate 100% accurate and precise (“VRayDirt - partially supported” is not very helpfull) feature list of VRay GPU.
I do not mind that stuff is not supported - just let me know that in documentation so I spend the time working around it and not troubleshooting.

[Karol.Osinski]

For anybody who wants to find out more about GPU development here is a link to one of the podcasts.
https://www.chaosgroup.com/blog/cg-g...est-taskov-gpu


My first thought: "Oh boy, here we go again ".

I was trying to approach Archviz production with V-Ray GPU for the last year and was getting really mixed results and I was scared to launch a scene previously prepared with CPU render in mind on GPU. Usually they didn't even fit the memory of RTX 2060 SUPER (8GB).

The real gamechanger for me was recent arrival of RTX 3090 in studio and now I am able to render almost all of our scenes with it. It roughly outperforms 2990wx by 100% and is still faster then 3970x in most cases. I find making previews with few minutes in progressive mode with Nvidia Denoiser on the top extremely fast, I've read that GPU is really efficient in Progressive mode, in fact, sometimes it makes me think it is faster than bucket mode. I am still big fan of buckets though. Obviously we can't render everything on GPU, one of our recent project takes up to 115GB of RAM (Villa with a lot of vegetation with 360 Panorama renders in mind).

I am really curious about the Out-of-core feature but at the same time I already imagine how buggy and inconsistent it might be at the beginning, I will definitely give it a try some time soon.

Now, as an archviz department we are leaning toward investing in more GPU power than CPU, hoping that things will only get better for the GPU, as well me and my team are becoming more aware of memory management and scene optimization.


Morbid Angel I know that the new Threadrippers are incredibly fast which confused a lot of people including me. However when you compare the raw performance of 2K worth hardware, let's say 3970x vs RTX 3090, the GPU wins....right? I still have to do some proper testing but from my observations it does render faster, especially glass with some advanced material, GPU literally eats through it while CPU buckets keep getting stuck.

[Pixelcon]

Out of curiosity, is there any way of seeing how much each aspect of a scene is using vram? For example Geom/Textures/FX

[Karol.Osinski]

Pixelcon in V-Ray Next there is tickbox in settings which creates you a .hmtl file with detailed report (it is created the moment you either finish rendering a frame or just stop the render) . In V-Ray 5 all information are directly displayed inside VFB 2.0.

[Pixelcon]

Pixelcon in V-Ray Next there is tickbox in settings which creates you a .hmtl file with detailed report (it is created the moment you either finish rendering a frame or just stop the render) . In V-Ray 5 all information are directly displayed inside VFB 2.0.

thank you!

[s_gru]

i am transitioning from IRAY for 3ds max to VRAY. been using IRAY for many many years - since the first titan cards came out. its so much faster and allows our designers to visualize instantly and more or less real-time. iray just recently developed things like a toon shader. but for a couple of years now they've had a bug that sometimes has a work around but sometimes you're stuck with it. i can't deal with that bug anymore so i have both renderers and any new projects are done in vray.

a lot of the development depends on nvidia i guess?

i'd love to see edge mode with gpu rendering. instancing takes care of my ram issues. i'll have scenes with 6-8million polys and have no trouble, i observe 6-8gb of ram max on one card from msi afterburner monitor for my 4 1080ti. i've not run across any limitations, but i can relate to getting fbx files with way too much to optimize all of it. although i can export some things from revit with a low level of detail - like structure (i-beams) as just squared off vs rounded corners (literally saved me 750k polygons on one of my recent projects).

so what i'd like to see in vray gpu is:

1. a consistent name for it - vray gpu, vray next what the heck is it called?!
2. edge mode for forest pro
3. better translucency for anything, not just vegitation
4. the ability to render 1 object in a scene where it's aliased against other objects in the background for better compositing
5. physically based lighting and materials - in several instances in the past, iray was able to predict shadows from glass decorative bulbs that when we took a picture of the final space, the shadows were there!
6. sun/sky system so that i can type in lat/long and animate time of day
7. CAUSTICS!!! iray supports caustics EXCEPT you could not get caustics underwater (looking down on a pool) but i figured out a way to do it 3 years back, but they never developed it.

but other than these few things i love it. it's just as fast you can tweak a lot more things that iray couldn't.

[Joelaff]

We really need all Phoenix features to work in GPU. The lack of motion blur on most of the particle shader modes makes it pretty useless for VFX.

The memory issue is a big one. Lots of assets, large assets, large textures (tiling helps there), displacements.