We received some reports about bad performance of the beta 3.02 releases. Beta 3.02 includes many changes, with a new BRDF and a rewritten CUDA framework being the main ones.
The new CUDA framework gives us more flexibility when we build kernels. To find out how different build options work, we created two versions using the same code, but different build setups. To make comparisons to 3.01 and previous versions easier, these two versions use the old BRDF model, i.e. are not meant for production use (the new BRDF model is much much nicer
). These versions contain all fixes of 3.02a plus some of 3.03.When you download the package below and unzip it, it will unpack a folder "OctaneRender_TEST_beta303_<os>" which will contain to sub-folders "x1" and "x2". These contain the two different builds.
We didn't receive any test scenes, which is why I attached 5 of the demo scenes - slightly updated. They all contain now 3 render target nodes, each using a different render kernel. The maximum samples is always set to 1000 and the path tracing and PMC kernels have always a maximum path depth of 8.
The scenes contained in the archive are:
- ChessSet with image textures, for a simple low-poly studio scene
- ChessSet with procedural textures, to test heavy procedural textures
- Hallway, as a very simple indoor scene
- OctaneBenchmark, the (in)famous exteriour trench with only one material (please use octane_benchmark.ocs)
- Screws, a fairly heavy studio scene with some procedurals and heaps of glossy materials
If you want to run the performance tests and report results, we would need the GPU, operating system, driver version and the speeds of one ore more of the test scenes run in beta 3.01, 3.02x1 and 3.02x2. If you are keen you can also render them in older versions and check what performance you get there, but we are mainly interested in the differences between 3.01, 3.02x1 and 3.02x2.
EDIT: If you measure PMC speeds, please wait until at least 100 samples/pixel to have the sampling rate settled.
We would be happy if we would get some test results, especially from those who have performance problems with beta 3.02 or beta 3.03.
Here are the downloads:
Windows 64bit:
http://render.otoy.com/rcdownloads/Octa ... _win64.zip
Mac OS 64bit (updated on 15/10/2012):
http://render.otoy.com/rcdownloads/Octa ... 64_new.zip
Linux 64bit (updated on 15/10/2012):
http://render.otoy.com/rcdownloads/Octa ... new.tar.gz
Test scenes:
http://render.otoy.com/rcdownloads/beta ... scenes.zip
Many thanks in advance and happy testing,
Marcus
