OTOY Forums

I'm building a system for a client with Octane Render being the target application. The hardware is as follows:

Intel P4304CR2LFKN platform
Intel W2600CR motherboard
2x Xeon E5-2620 CPUs
32GB RAM
4x eVGA GeForce GTX 690 cards
Samsung 840 256GB SSD
1TB HDD

Problem: whenever I have more than five GTX 690 devices active in the system, Octane Render starts up with a blank display. I can see the cursor changing shapes as I move it around the empty window, but I can't actually see anything. If I disable three out of eight devices, everything works fine, but that's basically throwing away $1500. I tried Windows 7 and Windows 8, driver versions 306, 310.70, 310.90, 314.07, and none of them can run more than five GPUs in this system.

However, when I installed CentOS 6.3 x64, with NVidia driver 310.32 (latest on the website), all eight GPUs run fine, and I'm getting ~25.40 Ms/sec render speed in the benchmark scene using Octane Render demo.

Problem is, the client's workflow is based around Windows, and fitting in a Linux system is problematic.

I contacted Intel and NVidia on this issue - Intel basically say that they haven't tested GTX 690 on this platform and don't supported, NVidia told me that they will check this out and get back to me, but so far I haven't heard from them.

Has anyone here experienced similar issues and was able to solve them?

Yes that seems to be a limitation of NVIDIA GeForce drivers/hardware: You can't have more than 5 NVIDIA GPUs and use OpenGL on at least one of them. We solved the problem using the on-board Intel HD 4000 GPU for display.

As a different solution, you can switch to the "software" viewport mode in Octane, which you can find in the preferences under "Application". That should work. You will find this in the demo version 1.10.

Also make sure that you use the GeForce driver 310.90 or higher, otherwise you won't have much fun with the setup.

Cheers,
Marcus

I see, thank you for confirming it. Interesting that the limitation only applies to Windows, not Linux. I don't have Intel graphics on this system - the onboard video is Matrox ServerEngines 200-something, and enabling it also results in issues with option ROMs resource space limitations. Going to look into adding an ATI 5th card for display output.

bmekler wrote:I see, thank you for confirming it. Interesting that the limitation only applies to Windows, not Linux. I don't have Intel graphics on this system - the onboard video is Matrox ServerEngines 200-something, and enabling it also results in issues with option ROMs resource space limitations. Going to look into adding an ATI 5th card for display output.

Or just use the software display. The computer should be more than powerful enough for that.

The client also needs to run Maya on the same system, so I'm guessing they'll need OpenGL.

bmekler wrote:The client also needs to run Maya on the same system, so I'm guessing they'll need OpenGL.

Uhm yes, good point...

I tested this by replacing one of the GTX 690s with an old Radeon X600 I had lying around and installing Windows 7 - no luck, Octane Render crashes on startup

For what it's worth, I got a Radeon 6450 PCIe x1 and reinstalled Windows 7 SP1 x64, with latest NVidia and AMD drivers. Octane Render standalone still crashes on startup, but the Maya plugin works. The main remaining issue is that when it starts rendering, one of eight GPUs remains throttled at 324MHz instead of going up to ~1060MHz like the other seven (as indicated by GPU-Z). Interestingly, under CentOS, all eight operated at ~915MHz under load (as indicated by NVidia Control Panel).

Try to start the standalone version in software display mode. You do this by adding an argument, --no-opengl, to the command line. Right-click on the Octane icon in the start menu, and in the "Target" box, append a space and then --no-opengl. The line should be similar to this: Press OK and then start Octane again.

--
Roeland