GPU CUDA render farm speed/cost comparison chart (june 2016)
Out of curiosity decided to quickly compare the cost and rendering performance of several CUDA-capable GPUs.
Scores taken from the official OctaneBench results database. Prices - from local online merchants in my area (TAX, VAT included) so your mileage may vary. I used my GTX 970 results as reference. The fact that it's one of the most popular enthusiast-grade GPUs on the market also helps.
I didn't account for the power consumption because electricity rates vary a lot from area to area so if you're planning to run your render farm 24/7 (which is not recommended) you can look into it yourself.
(Used) NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti is a clear winner here. So if you're thinking about building a render farm to use with Octane or Redshift, check it out, it's a bargain.
As soon as GTX 1080 CUDA-compute/rendering results become available I will add them to the chart. Don't expect a miracle though. Preliminary benchmark results from various forums including Redshift and Lexmark show that GTX 1080 is pretty much just a tad faster than 980 Ti and Titan, and in some heavy scenes it can actually be slower than the two! Hope it's just a driver problem and we'll see at least 20-25% improvement over the previous flagship models as promised by NVIDIA.
Otherwise it will be a grave disappointment.
Eric Thivierge's blog post on Softimage EOL: a year later
It's been over a year since Eric Thivierge, talented TD and creator of Species for Softimage as well as a set of other powerful tools, shared his feelings on Softimage XSI EOL.
First I'd like to post this quote because it perfectly reflects my feelings on the subject:
At this point I’d like to take the opportunity to say that I truly believe that Softimage got user interaction and a non-linear flexible workflow right. No other application I’ve used has anything close. The construction stack, ICE, native Object Oriented API, and countless other features go unmatched. I don’t want to use another application and it’d have been great to go my entire career not having to transition over to something else. The idea to end Softimage was one of the worst I could imagine and it was handled really poorly by Autodesk. They didn’t even have comparable replacements for things such as ICE. We’re still waiting for this stuff in Maya while other companies have been able to fly past with relative ease and implement similar workflows.
I want to comment on some of Eric's thoughts on the topic of moving on. The reasons mainly. Of course I am not an industry professional and just a hobbyist. I don't have to adapt to the DCC market, so this post should be taken with a grain of salt.
Create and render OpenVDB volume grids with Softimage and Redshift renderer
Note: a detailed tutorial is now available.
Since current version of Redshift requires OpenVDB-compliant voxel grids for its volume rendering, we need to somehow generate and export .vdb files from Softimage (not everybody has access to Houdini, you know).
Thanks to user Mr.Core from SI Community we have a set of ICE-compounds to do just that.
Mr.Core provided compounds to voxelize particles and geometry as well as perform actions on .vdb grids and polygonize them.
Here's an example on how to make a vdb cloud in Softimage, export it to a file and render with Redshift:
Redshift v2 volume rendering samples
Tried it. Amazed. Can't stop playing with the new Redshift! Volume rendering works like a charm with blazing speeds even with brute force GI enabled with about 500 samples! Crazy!
Tell me those are not some pretty clouds:
And this is not some heavy but oh so beautiful cloud of thick smoke:
Each of these renders took about 10 seconds on my nVidia Geforce GTX 970. Mind you this is not a powerful GPU anymore! According to preliminary tests GTX 1080 is twice as fast! Put four of those babies inside one big tower, grab a copy of Redshift and you've got your very own render farm that can render anything and fast! At least that's what I will do when the time comes to render the movie out.
Well, it's official. Redshift renderer is the best GPU rendering engine on the market! Well done guys!
And let me also thank Redshift team for supporting Softimage folk. You guys deserve a medal for this.
Redshift v2 demo available
After a long period of beta-testing version 2.0.44 of Redshift has finally been made available for everyone to try and play with.
If you don't know what Redshift3D is, it's a biased GPU renderer unlike many other GPU path tracers out there. To put it simply - it's like a supercharged VRay with all biased goodness like irradiance caching, photon mapping and precalculated SSS. Together with the new OpenVDB support it all makes Redshift a blast to work with.
Literally.
Here's what's new in 2.0 VS 1.3:
All V1.3 features PLUS:
- New “Redshift Material” which more closely follows the PBR paradigms (“metalness”, etc)
- New specular BRDFs (on top of the Ashikhmin-Shirley): GGX and Beckmann (Cook-Torrance)
- Nested dielectrics
- Multiple dome lights
- Baking
- Dispersion (part of the Redshift Material)
- OpenVDB Support
- Improved multiple-scattering model (part of the SSS, Skin and Redshift Material)
- Single scattering (part of the Redshift Material)
- Support for alSurface shader
- Linear specular glossiness/roughness response
- Improved photon mapping accuracy for complex materials
- Physically-correct Fresnel for rough reflections
- New SubSurfaceScattering and SubSurfaceScatteringRaw AOV types
- AOV improvements for blended materials
- NVidia Pascal GPU (GTX1070/1080) support
- Automatic memory management
- Better importance sampling of bokeh images
- Texture reference object support (Maya)
You can join the discussion on the official Redshift forums.
Another experiment of CGI integration
Latest CGI-to-live action experiment:
Rendered with Redshift 1.3 for Softimage, composed in After Effects. Mostly polishing the new HDRI map creation pipeline for realistic IBL-rendering with a raytracer. Imrod 3d model taken from TF3DM.
Softimage hotkeys mapping infographic
Since Autodesk officially EOL'd Softimage, XSI blogs and discussion groups have been gradually vanishing from the web which is a shame.
As a tribute to the great piece of software that Softimage is I will try to consolidate the most useful XSI-related stuff from the net.
Today we have a Softimage hotkeys infographic originally posted at XSIBase which is now non-existent. It's just too good to just perish so here are cleaned up versions in glorious PNG.