Since the upcoming denoiser that we are working on will be hardware accelerated, we decide to do few benchmarks using different hardware and I thought you could find those interesting.
Here are the results with the current implementation.
As a rough conclusion …
* Intel integrated GPUs denoises about ~1.5 to 2.0 times faster than an average Intel i7 CPU. Integrated Intel GPU (which comes with the most CPUs basically for free) gives roughly the performance of 1500$ Xeon CPU.
* AMD GPUs are about 3 to 5 times faster compared to NVIDIA GPUs.
* Having high end GPU in your system gives 10 to 30 times speed up. Having whatever GPU still makes it a lot faster.
* Intel Xeon Phi works for denoising as well, if you happen to have one of those around.
Too bad that when rendering in network all the render slaves have to have a GPU… In our case they don’t most of them, and if they do they’re pretty basic.
You don’t need to have GPUs in your render slaves.
The image is denoised only on the client, so if you render in DR, only the client hardware matters for the denoiser.
If you render different frames on different nodes, it is okay as well. We automatically find the most appropriate hardware for the denoising. If some of the nodes don’t have GPUs, they still can denoise just as good using their CPUs. This happens automatically. And you still can disable the hardware acceleration at all if you need that for some reason (there is a checkbox for that in the denoiser settings).
Just to clarify, this means that even with a regular V-Ray Advanced CPU rendering (no RT), the GPU is engaged only for the denoising stage? If so, wow!
Yes, but only slightly and keeping in mind that we didn’t really spend a lot of time to optimize the C++ code (it’s not that complicated anyways) it’s actually not bad.
This is great! We’re getting fantastic speed gains on our current project using the denoise method.
So now I have 1500 frames to denoise, what is the best method to denoise this batch of using multiple PCs?
Currently I’m using Lele’s VDenoise Command-line helper, I’m selecting “skip existing files” I have just started the process, it seems quite possible for multiple machines to start on the same frame simultaneously Am I right? if so is there a better method available or in the pipeline? Sorry for not fully testing before posting.
I’m working on adding options for the start and end frame to process for the next patch (didn’t have time for the release), but for the moment the -skipExisting option is the only way to do it.
Where can I find that Lele’s VDenoise Command-line helper?
By the way, would be awesome to have a verry little and simple GUI that would just let you load the image sequence, check the checkbox you need and press “GO”
