distributed render - cards utilized not more than 30-50%

[s_gru]

i have two machines one with titan x cards and one with gtx1080ti cards (4 each) and i just happened to notice that distributed rendering, i've only done IPR so far, the cards are not utilized beyond 30-50%, maybe one jumps up to 60%. i'm doing brute force 3 bounces. i cant be sure when this happened, i did update vray for max about a week or two ago, but have not seen any updates since then (usually it says new version available in teh Frame Buffer Window, and i thought i saw that 2 days ago, but it has not reappeared the last couple of days.

edit: when i turn off dist rendering, the cards on my main machine are hitting 100% every time they bounce up there.
this is max 2022.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hi s_gru

Are you sure it is not a network bandwidth issue? could you share your settings for V-Ray GPU?
How many render elements do you have in the scene?

[s_gru]

here's three screen shots. remote pc is on the left - main pc is on the right. i think the camera had some stupid blur feature on. anyway, the main pc is hitting 70% sometimes. the other screen shot is just the main pc without distributed rendering turned on at all. then finally there's the window that opens for settings in distributed rendering.

i had set the map size to resize, i've not done that before, but this time i did and i turned it off. same GPU usage on both machines.

i tried IPR with "bucket" rendering on GPU and that made no difference, in fact it rendered the IPR progressively.

i left bucket enabled and switched to production render and BAM-O all GPUs were 100% utilized.

I also have had brute force enabled for all of this, but i noticed in the vray GPU render server screen that it said bucket rendering is optimized for light cache not brute force. - in another thread i wondered why bucket rendering takes a LOT longer to render, i thnk i've tested it as being twice as long as brute force on just 1 machine.

edit: yep, as soon as i switched to IPR again, utilization dropped on both machines whether using bucket with lightcache/brute or progressive. and like i said, bucket didn't seem to be bucket, it was progressive. i might not have known that's normal if it is normal.

edit2: ah ok, so if i do progressive and production rendering, i get full utilization on both machines. so this seems to be limited to IPR only.

edit3: no render elements & network in working order.

[s_gru]

so just another update - any type of PRODUCTION rendering distributed between the two machines fully utilizes the GPU's on both machines. for fun, BUCKET w/Brute Force renders the scene in 6m19, PROGRESSIVE w/Brute Force renders in 5m 16s. PROGRESSIVE w/Brute Force renders in 8m 19s - on 1 machine only (GTX 1080ti machine aka "main").

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Thanks for the feedback s_gru it is very helpful to us

I'm able to reproduce the low GPU usage with IPR on my machines. I will investigate and discuss with the developers

And be assured that GPU usage in general is high priority to us, it is something I check regularly. There is an update to bucket mode coming soon, which should improve speed

Best,
Muhammed