Bretchts New Blender Render Design

[arexma]

So i think we are all agreed then!

ATI cards for display
Nvida cards for Cuda/Octane work.

Is this even possible? Because if it was, I would immediately install back my old & lousy Radeon 3650, which was giving me faster viewport navigation in Blender than a few generations better GTX 460

Actually I'm not sure.My tongue was firmly in my cheek with that comment.
I do have an old ATI XT2600 card lying around unused, but I only currently have one PCIE full width slot in my motherboard so I cannot try it out yet.
I promise that as soon as I upgrade my motherboard to a 2-3 PCIE slot unit, that will be the first thing I try out and i will report back on the findings.

I´ll get back to you guys tomorrow (I guess). I ordered a HD5850 for lousy 110 euro (the Sapphire 5850 Extreme retail), should be OC-able beyond GTX470 reference performance. I got 3 PCIex16 so I can try, but I most likely have to do it on the fly (not enough space in case)
I`ll check in W7 and ubuntu if they work together. If they do, I´ll grab a new case to fit all my cards (Coolermaster HAF-X - fits 4*dualslot cards), if not I order an AMDx6 and 8 gig memory and build a "Blender CPU/OpenCL system" and keep this system as CUDA system. It´s still cheaper than buying a Quadro2000 - although I have to admit it´s tempting to get one, but I am at a point where I deliberately boykott Nvidia.

It should be possibel to run both cards as long as both are detected by the OS, which means it needs a screen connected or a dummy DVI connector. It does not work to use PhysX in games whith a Radeon in the system, however I read CUDA works just fine and if it doesn´t I am certain there´s a driverhack somewhere.

[Jaberwocky]

Nice One

Looking forwards to the results of the experiment.

Everyone keep your fingers crossed.

[matej]

@arexma, thanks for your time. I'm interested in what you'll find out, although I'm a bit sceptical how would this two card work in the same comp. You would need to install both drivers for ATI and Nvidia? This things are beyond my expertise...

When Octane will support OpenCL (hopefully it will someday) I'm ditching Nividia in one nanosecond. Such lousy actions (purposely crippling drivers) deserve only a boycott.

[matej]

About the topic: I seriously doubt that Brecht copied Octane code (it's not professional and it would be stupid), but he obviously used the knowledge he gained when working with RS. As I said previously it seems strange that Cycles uses CUDA, which is proprietary, and not OpenCL which is a standard supported by everybody and better fits a FOSS paradigm.

Anyway, if RS would be Apple, Brecht would be sued to the bone and beyond, but RS can't afford such actions in any way. So as most of you pointed out, RS should focus on Octane development and keeping the lead. The new render kernel with caustics and dispersion will again turn a few heads toward Octane, when people start pouring out all that glass scenes that have been on hold so far...

[radiant]

ok the windows build is released. I had a test around with it only in cpu mode.
In all honesty it is pretty fast but it does crash alot. and i do feel guilty using it.
i will render a 250 animation over night and see if it crashes.

[Proupin]

+1 Lutze, is the same as say: "Octane Render copied FPRIME technology" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phK6vAg-uHw) , as far as I know FPRIME was the first progressive render several years ago, in the nowdays is very common this technique, maya has, 3ds max, lightwave has (wihtout plugins as fprime) and now Blender has.

Did any of those who developed Octane and others previously worked for Worley? that might do the difference

[r4ytrace]

the build thats out is non-CUDA/GPU accelerated

[DavidT]

Is this even possible? Because if it was, I would immediately install back my old & lousy Radeon 3650, which was giving me faster viewport navigation in Blender than a few generations better GTX 460

Actually I'm not sure.My tongue was firmly in my cheek with that comment.
I do have an old ATI XT2600 card lying around unused, but I only currently have one PCIE full width slot in my motherboard so I cannot try it out yet.
I promise that as soon as I upgrade my motherboard to a 2-3 PCIE slot unit, that will be the first thing I try out and i will report back on the findings.

I´ll get back to you guys tomorrow (I guess). I ordered a HD5850 for lousy 110 euro (the Sapphire 5850 Extreme retail), should be OC-able beyond GTX470 reference performance. I got 3 PCIex16 so I can try, but I most likely have to do it on the fly (not enough space in case)
I`ll check in W7 and ubuntu if they work together. If they do, I´ll grab a new case to fit all my cards (Coolermaster HAF-X - fits 4*dualslot cards), if not I order an AMDx6 and 8 gig memory and build a "Blender CPU/OpenCL system" and keep this system as CUDA system. It´s still cheaper than buying a Quadro2000 - although I have to admit it´s tempting to get one, but I am at a point where I deliberately boykott Nvidia.

It should be possibel to run both cards as long as both are detected by the OS, which means it needs a screen connected or a dummy DVI connector. It does not work to use PhysX in games whith a Radeon in the system, however I read CUDA works just fine and if it doesn´t I am certain there´s a driverhack somewhere.

I thought I would mention that I have been running both an ATI card and nVidia card with Octane for about a year without any problems. I have a GTX 470 and a Radeon HD 4670 in a Windows 7 64-bit system. I have 3 monitors. The nVidia displays on the left monitor and the ATI on the middle and right monitors. When using Octane I avoid doing anything on the left monitor since everything on that monitor lags, but I can still do things smoothly on the middle and right monitors. I typically use Octane on the middle monitor. No real issues so far.

[radiant]

hmmmm when i press animation i expect after 50 bounces it to go to the next frame not render the same frame 250 times
Yep this is extremely glitchy, and who put back the right click and cut area back??????

[grimm]

I got OpenCl to work with a ATI card and two Nvidia cards. In the end I was able to get OpenCL to see all three cards and the CPU's (via the ATI driver). At the time it didn't work for what I wanted to do and have one of the Nvidia cards as the main display card. ATI's linux drivers are still not very good in my opinion. I was able to have the ATI card as the main display and use the Nvidia cards as compute nodes. The opposite was not possible because the ATI drivers will not run headless (not connected to a monitor). It was a tricky setup and I had to install the drivers in a very specific order. Other wise one driver would overwrite something the other driver needed. I did not test CUDA with the setup, so YMMV! Don't expect much if any cooperation between the two vendors and their drivers.

So i think we are all agreed then!

ATI cards for display
Nvida cards for Cuda/Octane work.

Is this even possible? Because if it was, I would immediately install back my old & lousy Radeon 3650, which was giving me faster viewport navigation in Blender than a few generations better GTX 460