What should we develop on the GPU first?

[WAS]

For me rendering happens in times I do not use my workstation or it goes to another machine over night.
There are more options to get your final render done - may cost you extra but they are out there.

And since we can only choose one option I am all in for the fastest 3D preview update we can get.
There is no substitute for that. Will RTP be developed further when the developers work on GPU processing now?
It`s a pain to wait for rerendering of the terrain. This really slows things down for me.
If the accuracy of the previz could be enhanced also - even better.
Clouds seem to be quite ok with RTP for now.

Development cycles for TG seem slow (to me as a customer), so workflow enhancement while I am building has no.1 priority.
CHeers, Klaus

Honestly a better 3d preview would be nice, but with the current inconsistencies I always find a small full render to provide the best feedback, and can render pretty quick given the right settings. This is where the "quick renders" came from in the past when th 3D preview was even slower on old CPUs.

[bart]

My vote is going definitely to rendering. This is where Terragen lags behind the most in my opinion. All major renderers are going GPU or hybrid CPU and GPU, and not only simple path tracers (like in Terragen), but also more sophisticated spectral ones with extra wavelength dimension to calculate..

The devs even have an option to adopt free of charge existing renderers like AMD Prorender, Blender Cycles or Luxcore render, instead of translating existing code to CUDA or OpenCL.

As for denoising, OIDN (Open Image DeNoise) - which is CPU based, is much better then GPU based Optix. OIDN takes maybe around 5 seconds to denoise 1080p image with 6-core CPU. Optix takes maybe 1-2 seconds on GTX1080.

You can play around with these two and compare them for free in Blender 2.90 Alpha. You can actually test it on a render from terragen.

Implementing denoiser such as OIDN in Terragen should be relatively easy, as this is or can be independent from the whole rendering process, with most wow effect. It is already available to us for free in blender for example, but it takes extra few minutes to set it up.

Anyway, I hope a lot of new potential Terragen users will see this thread, and seeing the future is bright, they will be finally tempted to make a purchase, which in turn brings the company more money, which hopefully translate to investing in more developer manpower, and by 2022/3 we might have a beta build to test and see some GPU in action.

Exciting times ahead. Can't wait.

[Prometheus]

can´t vote anymore,
But I would say rendering of cloud and atmosphere.
Rtp is decent up to a certain size of the viewport, then becomes too slow.

comparing Blender GPU and lightwave CPU when rendering vdb volumes, the cpu is just too darn slow, then again the GPU can only handle what I have in memory so to large vdb datasets, and the cuda fails to initiate.

But if that can work great with GPU for cloud rendering in the previewer/RTP   that would be it for me, I do not have the higher end cpu´s, so my mid range asus G20B rog with Nvidia gtx 1080 and 32 mb of ram and 3.2 GHz cpu will have to do...for a couple of years.

[PabloMack]

I'm sad that I am too late for voting! I would say that the preview rendering (terrain highest priority) in TG should be done first. If preview was near instantaneous, I'd be pretty happy. It is the interactive stuff that is most frustrating to have to wait for. The final rendering is generally unattended so I can sleep when that is going on.