Save your pennies (new 6 core / 12 thread intel chip)

[RArcher]

Much more info here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/18581

Looks as though this is the chip of choice for rendering for the next 6 months to a year or so, just a shame is has such a high price tag.

[Henry Blewer]

I love technology, but the rate these new processors and stuff are released... I need to be independently wealthy.
But, this will drive down the cost of a computer I may be able to afford someday.

[otakar]

Exactly, this will just make the stuff for us mortals cheaper. I've resigned myself to limping behind by three to five years as compared to the latest and greatest. No big deal when you think about it, really.

[FrankB]

unfortunately the competition is way off the marks, which is why Intel can ask these exaggerated prices. The i7 920 should be in the range of commodity pricing by now, but AMD keeps failing. So Intel has absolutely no motivation to lower their prices.
I would like to buy an AMD processor next time, just to help with competition, but the performance is just too much off (for rendering). For a pure office and average gaming PC, AMD would be an option, but not for rendering at this point.

Frank

[Hetzen]

I would have thought GPUs are the way forward, especially when you have AMD, Nvidia and Intel all looking into this. The Tesla cards are already out with 220 cores all running at 1.33ghz, and when you think you can have four of those in a box already the mind boddles at what will be possible. Vray RT already works with GPUs, and are currently working to get the code in Vray to also harness this power. To give an idea of the performance boost on older GPU cards, I've seen a demo of a Vray scene that took 3mins to render, being reduced to 8 seconds.

I know that TG 0.9 has been ported onto Tesla based systems through Cuda. Does anyone know if TG2 has any plans in this direction?

Just think, 880 buckets rendering on your screen instead of 4,8 or with the above chip 12. Mmmm, salivating already.

[Kadri]

Hetzen , this was a long topic how did you miss it 

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7684.0

Cheers.

Kadri.

[Hetzen]

Kadri, somehow I did. I suppose I had no idea what Cuda was until a few weeks back, and just considered it another 'how do I get TG terrain into AnOther app' type of thread. Thanks for drawing my attention to it again.

I do know that the guys over at Vray are re-writing their Vray RT code to take advantage of GPU cards. One of their software engineers has talked about the problems they face over on their private user forums, and have been active in doing so since the beginning of this year. The problem my company faces, is whether to expand the render farm, or wait 6 months.

[Kadri]

Kadri, somehow I did. I suppose I had no idea what Cuda was until a few weeks back,
and just considered it another 'how do I get TG terrain into AnOther app' type of thread. Thanks for drawing my attention to it again.

I do know that the guys over at Vray are re-writing their Vray RT code to take advantage of GPU cards.
One of their software engineers has talked about the problems they face over on their private user forums,
and have been active in doing so since the beginning of this year. The problem my company faces, is whether to expand the render farm, or wait 6 months.

Do you have any link for us (about Vray with GPU rendering) , Hetzen ?
And is this for final rendering or preview ?

Kadri.

[Hetzen]

The thread with the Vray software engineer comments are in their user only forums, so I can't link you to them unfortunately. And yes, he was talking about Vray final reders.

I've only seen a demo of Vray RT, which was using a GT285 (?) Not one of the Tesla cards.

http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/SIGGRAPH-2009-CHAOS-GROUP-GPU.shtml

What they are saying over at Vray, is that RT is almost a test bed for the code needed to get full flavour Vray up and running, and is something they've been working on for some time now. Although there are some issues that have to be over come, one being that the connection to the graphics card is the slowest link in the chain, and that you want to use it as little as possible.

One of the articles posted in this section a while back talked about Nvidia putting a dedicated CPU on a GPU card to manage the GPU cores. But I have no idea when that's going to be released.

There's also a program called Machstudio Pro which will take a Max scene then light and texture it in real time...

http://www.studiogpu.com/

But it looks a bit cartoony to me, although that maybe down to the style of the texturer. We may get a demo of it, just to see what performance to expect from these cards, but I doubt we'll go down this route, especially if Vray is actively working in this direction.

[Kadri]

Thanks , Hetzen . These things will be hot for the next 2-4 years it seems

[Oshyan]

I believe an 8 core, 16 thread CPU is also coming this year. Woo!

Hetzen, where did you hear that TG Classic had been ported to CUDA/GPU?

- Oshyan

[Hetzen]

Hetzen, where did you hear that TG Classic had been ported to CUDA/GPU?

I was sent this link by a chap wanting to sell Tesla card servers to us, and went off looking into what software we use would benefit...

http://gpu.sourceforge.net/terragen.php

[Kadri]

I didn't have time to read all . But it has nothing to do with graphic cards. It is about distributed network rendering so far i see.

GPU : a Global Processing Unit

http://gpu.sourceforge.net/
http://lakegeneva.dubaron.com/


Edit : Ryan i hope we are not far away from your original topic  

Kadri.

[Hetzen]

Ahh. I should stay away from these sorts of discussions then. Looks like the company name 'GPU' fooled me and the guy trying to flog those Tesla cards. LOL.

This was an e-mail I got from him about Cuda enabled graphic software ....

It was a pleasure to chat with you last week, you have a very interesting requirement which I was able to spend some time on over the weekend.



Let's get the negative out the way first 3D Max dose not support CUDA and conversations with them they have no intention of changing this at present as your DSP farm is the way they prefer and that's how there software has been coded.



Now the Good news the plug-ins will support CUDA so our box's can be used as if it was an Adobe rip for example. Speaking to other animation people the time saved where it would take months before would now take weeks or even days due to there being 960+ GPU computer cores and 4 TFLOPS of computational power



I have now developed a direct relationship with NVIDIA over the weekend and they have put me in touch a company who has 18 years experience manufacturing this technology. There seams to be no delay in this equipment being shipped contra to what I was earlier told just a build time of 10-14 days. It would depend of the level of your in house expertise and what services you required from me to determine the best route to go down.  If you require little or no technical support it could be supplied through one of my companies and 24 Hour Computer Help LTD have trade agreements set up for the NVIDIA route. 



The Following software I am told supports the CUDA NVIDIA technology straight out the box I am waiting for written conformation from NVIDIA and will let you know when I have this.



Planetside Terragen Deep Edition 2.0.0.3.1



Renderman 3D



V-Ray



3D Max Backburner  plug-in



I hope you had a great weekend and look forward to speaking to you in the near future. I have also attached a list below a list of currently supported CUDA software which was obtained from NVIDIA.







Best regards

........


List of GPU/CUDA Enabled Applications



Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 workflow

Adobe Creative Suite 4,

Autodesk® Moldflow® Insight 2010

AntiPlanet

ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theatre 3 Platinum

Badadoom Media Converter

Citrix HDX 3D for professional graphics

Cyberlink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra,

DivideFrame GPU Decoder

EyeSoft

Folding@home and SETI@home

Furry Ball: GPU renderer for Maya

GPU Decoder (vegus/premiere)

HD NVR

Illustudio

Jackets Graphic Toolbox for MATLAB

leverage CUDA-based PhysX technology

Loilo LoiLoScope,

Loilo Touch

Loilo's Super Loiloscope,

Matlab - The MathWorks

MediaShow Expresso

Mirror's Edge AAA game title to fully

Mirics FlexiTV

MotionDSP vReveal,

Nebula 3

Nero Move it, and more.

Nero Moveit

Movavi Video Converter

Mediacoder

Opensource CUDA-enabled FLAC encoder

Planetside Terragen Deep Edition 2.0.0.3.1

Power DVD 9

PowerDirector Ultra

PowerProducer 5

Renderman 3D

Reveal version 8 (muvee)

Radius

Roxio Creator 2010

Reverberate LE GPU Edition

SuperLoiloScope

TMPGEnc 4.0Xpress

TMPGEnc KARMA..Plus

Unreal Engine

V-Ray

vReveal

VST Plugin Convolution Reverb

WinDVD 2010

[Kadri]

In such positions i tend to be in a controlled good faith approach . Maybe he doesn't know all the stuff he is talking .
But this is another bad aspect too of course . Anyway 

Kadri.