OctaneRender® pre-Beta 2.41 (win x64) [OBSOLETE]

[SamCameron]

What about the low performance in GTX460 cards? in the previous version 2.40 Octane Render showed the right number of cores but the performance wasn't good enough (about 20% I remember), is does this version fix the problem???

[Jaberwocky]

No.Performance is the same.

Possible design problem with the GF104 Chip.

Bottleneck may be happening.

See this link.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvid ... 00-king/16

[ROUBAL]

I reinstalled 260.99 and didn't switch on my Cubix. I launched Octane 2.41 and loaded a very small ocs with only the head of a character I'm working on : It worked, but with only my GTX260, it is not usable with two big screens !

I just saw that my reported bug about the horizontal bar when subsampling is enabled has not been fixed.

Then, I rebooted with the Cubix. I had to reinstall the 260.99 for each of my two GTX480, and reboot each time.

When done, I launched again Octane 2.41 : First it opened but refused to load an ocs, and frozen the computer requiring a hardware reboot.

Sometimes Octane doesn't even open, and freezes the computer when launching, and sometimes opens but doesn't load ocs or obj ! The mesh node is created, but clicking onit has no effect : the memory is not filled.

All other softwares work fine with 260.99. Finally, I think that I found out what is really going wron :

I tried again with the Cubix Xpander OFF, and it works with only my GTX260. Initially, I thought that it was because of not supporting multi GPU, so I have changed the Cuda preferences in Octane to keep only one GTX480 for computing : same behavior with only one GPU : Doesn't load ocs or obj files.

It is worse than expected :

Octane behave like ignoring the external GPUs ! My Cubix with its two GTX480 seems to be not usable with Cuda 3.2 ! It is a nightmare !

I have tried to switch back to Octane 2.3v5 : Same trouble ! So it is really due to the driver with Cuda 3.2 not supporting external GPUs !
2.3v5 with only the weak internal card, works (very slow and unresponsive, obvioulsly).

I bought the Cubix because my workstation can't host these cards. I'll hope that this problem will be solved soon ! Non multi GPU support is one thing, but if you can't access to your external GPU even if selecting only one, it is not the same !

Please, I would like to get some reports from Cubix users.

Sorry, Guys... I still can't use this release.

[ttaberna]

Nice update!
BTW could it be possible to have opacity chanel to map with rgb for lights projecting colors instead of the actual BW float?
It would be nice to see that in next releases
THX

[Jaberwocky]

to samCameron

Further to my post above.

This is a quote from the Annandtech site i linked to regarding testing of the GF104 - Fermi chip as used in the GTX460

"Due to the fact that NVIDIA added an additional block of CUDA cores to an SM without adding another warp scheduler, the resulting superscalar design requires that the card extract ILP from the warps in order to simultaneously utilize all 3 blocks of CUDA cores.

As a result the range of best case to worst case scenarios is wider on GF104 than it is GF100: while GF100 could virtually always keep 2 warps going and reach peak utilization, GF104 can only reach peak utilization when at least 1 of the warps has an ILP-safe instruction waiting to go, otherwise the 3rd block of CUDA cores is effectively stalled and a GTX 460 performs more like a 224 CUDA core part. Conversely with a total of 4 dispatch units GF104 is capable of exceeding GF100’s efficiency by utilizing 4 of 7 execution blocks in an SM instead of 2 of 6.

Or in other words, GF104 has the possibility of being more or less efficient than GF100."


This then may be a possible explination on why the GTX460 - using the GF104 GPU design ,although appearing to use all the cores is still no faster using Cuda 3.2 and is in fact only as fast an old GTX260/280 card and a lot slower than the GTX 465/470 cards which used the older GF100 GPU.

Perhaps someone at Refractive could comment.

[ROUBAL]

Octane with 3.2 Cuda driver ignores the external GPUs ! So, external boses like Cubix seems to be not usable with Cuda 3.2 !

Please, Cubix users test and confirm !

[GeoPappas]

This then may be a possible explination on why the GTX460 - using the GF104 GPU design ,although appearing to use all the cores is still no faster using Cuda 3.2 and is in fact only as fast an old GTX260/280 card and a lot slower than the GTX 465/470 cards which used the older GF100 GPU.

Perhaps someone at Refractive could comment.

If only some of the cores are used (and some are sitting idle) as the article suggests, then that would make sense. But I am getting the impression that people are stating that all of the cores are being used. And if they are being used, then there should be a performance increase. Someone with a GTX 460 needs to test using GPU-Z (or something similar). Does GPU-Z show all 336 cores being used. If so, then there should be a speed increase.

[face]

Octane with 3.2 Cuda driver ignores the external GPUs ! So, external boses like Cubix seems to be not usable with Cuda 3.2 !

Please, Cubix users test and confirm !

Maybe the dual GPU in the expander makes the trouble.
I would try to remove one card from the expander, just to see if it works...

face

[Jaberwocky]

GeoPappas

yep already done that.

Used GPU Z V0.5 whilst rendering up a scene on my Gigabyte GTX460 1GB card.

GPU shows at around 95-98% usage.

[MOSFET]

It worked, but with only my GTX260, it is not usable with two big screens !

Just to be clear: Are you saying that your single GPU (GTX260) cannot run two monitors and Octane simultaneously? Is it because you're running out of VRAM?