OTOY Forums

Hello!
I'm looking forward to buying this engine soon, but I need some questions to be anwered.
1. Can I do 2x GTX 470 and use my 2 hexacores together or/and with them?
2. Is it possible to select the cores, in case I want only 4 rendering and can I select the GPU that should render or not ?
3. How about the scaling? If I buy 2 GTX 470/480 will the performance nearly double like CPUs?
4. How much stress does the engine produce on a GPU? In Fryrender it was very low. So will it stress like Furmark or more like a heavy game?

5. My plan is to use my 24GB RAM + 2 HExas for large scenes since GPU RAM can't handle the amount of data. And for eg interiors or prod viz the whole power of 2 Hexas and 2 GPUs together. Good decision? Correct me if I'm wrong!

Thank you for your answers!

hi, what's a hexa ?

Radiance

Oh I mean an Intel Xeon Hexacore CPU 5650, and two of them in my computer.

ok

octane does'nt use CPUs for rendering, only GPUs.
it does'nt make much sense to use CPUs, as those GTX470's are like 20x faster than the CPUs, so you won't even notice the difference that much.
multi-gpu and fermi support is supported in the 2.1 release which is coming soon in a couple of days.
using 2 GPUs with 2.1 will literally nearly double the speed.

Radiance

stephan-as-ice wrote:Hello!
I'm looking forward to buying this engine soon, but I need some questions to be anwered.
1. Can I do 2x GTX 470 and use my 2 hexacores together or/and with them?
2. Is it possible to select the cores, in case I want only 4 rendering and can I select the GPU that should render or not ?
3. How about the scaling? If I buy 2 GTX 470/480 will the performance nearly double like CPUs?
4. How much stress does the engine produce on a GPU? In Fryrender it was very low. So will it stress like Furmark or more like a heavy game?

5. My plan is to use my 24GB RAM + 2 HExas for large scenes since GPU RAM can't handle the amount of data. And for eg interiors or prod viz the whole power of 2 Hexas and 2 GPUs together. Good decision? Correct me if I'm wrong!

Thank you for your answers!

Just my 2 cents...
You can answer your own questions by running the demo version as it is not that different compared to the commercial version. Ex. Save scene/image and other minor stuff.

1. Absolutely, but it will run only in one GPU. Support for multiple GPU is coming.
2. Octane runs solely on GPU which means it uses only the GPU memory and its horsepower. More CPU and system RAM isn't really gonna make that much of a difference.
3. Don't know. Radiance can answer that better.
4. Use the demo version to get a 1st hand experience. Its fun.
5.If you are getting 24GB RAM and 2 Hexas just for Octane then don't because Octane only uses GPU memory and its raw processing power which is better than any cpu you can throw at it at this moment.

Radiance is a pro so you can also wait for his answer.

4.- totally test it yourself, octane is like quake-ing throught your buildings, lots of fun (and as a plus it does seem like a nice work tool, hehehe)

Oh this is interesting news. I tested the demo on my test-PC and for me it looks like very painful to be constrained by the GPU RAM. Since I do more complex exterior scenes I thought I could give them to the Hexacores. Actually I have 2x 5650 Hexacores and a GTX 280 with 24Gig RAM. I do some bad-ass landscape renders this summer and I think I will need even more RAM since I'm reaching an edge here and there.And yes I use instancing etc!
I really like the engine and the flow etc. it's fun, but if I imagine to pump a GTX 480 and then get memory overflow oh -no
Anyways my hexacores can use another engine to render maybe and go with dual engines...

You should buy the Tesla C2070 with 6GB GDDR5 vram when it comes.

About this, well I have no idea of programing so this might sound dumb, couldn't it be implemented the use of the physical RAM to suplement somehow the GPU's RAM? I mean, like a scratch disk memory, so even thought if the scene required more RAM it wouldn't overflow the GPU's.

atm, buying the tesla, even the 480 sounds like sci-fi to me lol

kubo wrote:About this, well I have no idea of programing so this might sound dumb, couldn't it be implemented the use of the physical RAM to suplement somehow the GPU's RAM? I mean, like a scratch disk memory, so even thought if the scene required more RAM it wouldn't overflow the GPU's.

atm, buying the tesla, even the 480 sounds like sci-fi to me lol

no, the lag and bandwidth over the PCI-E bus is way too slow for this.

Radiance