Network render issue.

[electric_eric]

Hi, Does anyone here have any experience of network rendering with Octane?

I have a new GPU rig with 8 x GTX980ti and I'm having issues with getting it to render over the network.

Yesterday I had it working with 4 cards on a pretty low spec slave machine. Since then I've bought a new, high spec machine with top of the range motherboard, 32GB RAM etc etc and now I can't get the thing to work.

In Lightwave on the master it is showing up in the list and has 7 GPU's available - I render a frame and it is no faster than when I do a local render with 2 GPU's.

In the render statistics - Net GPU's (total/updated): I get 7/0 which suggests to me that the slave GPU's are doing nothing.

Windows firewall is off on both machines and both are using the same version number of the standalone.

The strange thing is I got this working on a low spec machine yesterday, with 4 cards. Now I cant even get 4 cards working on the new high spec machine.

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

[juanjgon]

Can you please test the Standalone application in the workstation to know if we have a problem with the plugin or if it is an Octane issue?

Do you have more than 12 total GPUs (including the GPUs in your workstation)? ... the Octane native network rendering is limited to 12 GPUs currently.

-Juanjo

[electric_eric]

I've tried the sample scenes in the standalone on the slave PC and master and that seems to be rendering ok.

[electric_eric]

We currently have issues with getting all of the cards to be recognised by Octane and Geforce experience. They are all showing up in device manager but not anywhere else.

In total we have 11 cards but have tested with as few as 5 without luck.

[juanjgon]

But can you network rendering using the Standalone in the master machine? ... I mean, can you use the Standalone in the workstation, configure the network node and render with the 11 GPUs?

I have read that to have more than 7 GPUs in the same Windows system is not easy, but I don't have experience with more than 4 GPUs in the same computer.

Anyway we should try to use Standalone for the tests, and later try the LW plugin.

-Juanjo

[3dreamstudios]

Could it be a licensing issue? I know we had a terrible time getting licensing correctly setup for our network rendering. But we were using only TWO GPU's and an external render controller (Butterfly net render) and lightwave.

Are you using Lightwave/Screamernet to network render? Or are you using Lightwave/3rd Party Controller? Or last Standalone/Network-Slave rendering?

[electric_eric]

Ok so it seems that Octane standalone works with the network rendering.

I did a test render with my local GPU's (2x titan) and it was 40 seconds for 3000 samples.

With network rendering on the same scene rendered in 16 seconds. Sure a decent saving but that is using 7 x gtx980ti's plus my 2 x titan so I would have expected a bigger rendertime reduction- not sure what's going on there.

I tested a scene yesterday while the GPU network rendering was working and it reduced a 17minute render to only 5 minutes using 4xGTX 980ti's - so 7x cards should be much quicker.

Trying the plugin again now shows 0/0 Net GPU cards working

[juanjgon]

What version of the plugin and standalone are you using?
If you open the network configuration window from LightWave, can you see the GPUs of your render node?

[juanjgon]

With network rendering on the same scene rendered in 16 seconds. Sure a decent saving but that is using 7 x gtx980ti's plus my 2 x titan so I would have expected a bigger rendertime reduction- not sure what's going on there.

Some time is spent transferring the data to the remote GPUs and initializing the rendering, so the local machine could have rendered a lot of samples before the render node begins render. Try a more complex scene that needs few minutes to render in your local machine to be sure.

-Juanjo

[electric_eric]

Standalone 2.23.2
Lw plugin 2.23.2.1

In the lw plug Network prefs it shows the slave pc and 7 GPUS - set to enabled.

In render window it now shows net GPU as 0/0