Cycles performance on new Nvidia hardware
Alexander Weide reports on his experiences with the Nvidia Geforce 750 Ti OC, the problems he ran in to and how he fixed them.
From time to time we all try to make our workflow faster. Clients are not interested in long render times, because thats time we lost and often doesn’t get paid. So my personal way is to improve my render times to be faster than other Artist.
Last weekend I bought a new Nvidia Card and was heavily surprised by the speed and the quality, that I get with Cycles and a Geforce 750 Ti OC.
But there was one problem in the first place. Cycles wasn’t not working with the latest cards. Because of the Cycles Cuda Core support.
So I was frustrated and searched for a solution to get my card work with Cycles. And I found a post on Blender Artists and a Blender wiki Link to get the Cuda Kernel for Cycles. My card need the version 5.0 and by default Blender only support previous versions.
So if you got the same problem, try to read the wiki of Blender and buy a new card, because the speed and the quality of the new Kepler Cards of Nvidia are just awesome. I am honest it freaks me out in positiv way;)
Some of you know my old Mercedes carmodel, that i’ve made with Blender and Cycles. Last year I rendert one image, in Full HD, and 2k sample amount. I had to wait nearly one hour to get a good looking image. That is wasted time -> A animation shot could render weeks. After I bought the new card and patched my Blender 2.70, my render time drop to nearly 3 minutes each frame.. I thought that is a joke, and thought that I forgot to uprise my sample amount to 2k. And of cource I forgot it. I only rendered with 500 Samples….woah. Then I made a lot of tests with my water subsurface scatter shader and found out that the new kepler cards dont need so much samples. My Water Shader dropt from 24 Minutes with my old 550 Ti to 2 minutes each frame. That is awesome.
These new cards are produce less noise and rendert faster. My Mercedes Model is nearly ready within 30 seconds(15 seconds for compilation of shaders and model data) and 100 Samples. But for high resolution and deph blur you need five times more. I can’t believe it. So I could only say. if you are bored to wait hours for a final image. Use one of the new cards and hopefully the Cuda Kernels for 5.0 or higher get implemented in Cycles by default ASAP.
Hope you like it. I could only post one image here, but the two other ones are on my website.
Show the world that Cycles is the fastest and best renderer out there!!! Try it yourself with Nvidia and CUDA. and forget about CPU like render times!;)
That’s odd… Looking at the results of the Blender Cycles Benchmark, the more modern cards are hardly any faster than the old ones…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As2oZAgjSqDCdElkM3l6VTdRQjhTRWhpVS1hZmV3OGc#gid=0
that benchmark is so horrible lol idk why we still use it… it goes back all the way to 2.61
I don’t see how a graphics card could affect the noise of an image, it is still using the same program.
I think it was just the software optimizations between the time of the old card and the new.
i dont know it in detail because of what.. or what not^^ but, i render the image with the old card before and after 2k samples i got alot of noise. then i load my old shots with the same version of blender and only need 500 to get better results…
The 750 ti is a Maxwell card not a Kepler card.. Also the card its self cant clean up in less samples it must be the newer version of blender if they did that rendering would be a mess and animations would flicker like crazy. The 550 ti is soooo slow most high end CPUs are faster.
The 750 ti is a very good card for the price it beats the 560 ti and the 660 in rendering most of the time
There are some things GPU is slower at like hair rendering
i could make a test but i see only one difference even with hair the gpu is faster. Maybe it has something to do with the pci express 3.0 slot i got on the asus board. The card itself is asus too. I dont want to make advertisement in any way but Asus Hardware is best in my point of view^^
theres already a hair test file its called koro http://blender.dingto.org/cycles_benchmark/koro.zip
thanks for the file i am testing it right now…
you must test it in the 2.71 test build. 2.7 did not optimize hair yet
answer above
Ok i’ll test it with Blender 2.71. With CPU 1 Min and 1 Second
and with GPU 1 min and 27 Seconds
its nice by the way that the hair rendering is much faster. But other stuff is much slower like reflexions and so on. my mercedes images render 40% longer in 2.71!! That is not acceptable.
so the GPU in 2.71 is about 1 min and 20 seconds faster than 2.70
i thought it was slower…
i thought it too. but the images of my mercedes everything with alot of reflexions are much slower around 40% slower. and that is time i waste in 2.71 against 2.70. so i will wait till its fixed with cuda toolkit 6.5
are your files publicly available?
no. because of my shaders. even my ocean GPU Subsurface scatter shader. i don’t share it, because i was working on both shaders for more than one year. hope you understand that this is my development. i can only sell it to you^^ sorry.
if only blender developers had that attitude :P
yeah but you cannot compare it. My work depends on it… i do 3d Animation since i was 12 now i am 29 so i learned alot about the business and how hard it is. hope you understand it.
actually i dont understand it lol. all your work depends on a shader?
no but imagine that you could make a difference against other artists. that can save your work. if you do it faster then the other one. Quality has to meet Speed. And the Shaders are the key to this.
its a big world and i dont think because you give 1 guy a shader your never going to have a job again xD
sorry please understand but i believe in murphy’s law;)
lol
But, the developers are doing a very excellent job. Cycles is for me the best renderer out there. I was working with Mental Ray, Vray , Mantra, C4D Renderer, 3dsmax Scanline and Renderman. and no one of these are such fast and intuitive for users. its like a wet dream;)
So do you want to tell the developers to optimize their file? it was made to test hair rendering. My job at Theory Animation is to optimize cycles renders, I know how its done.
Now render with your CPU in 2.71
Also the times mean nothing if we don’t know your hardware.
and
https://developer.blender.org/T40363
are you alexgerman? lol
yes one of my old accounts.
I will not install 2.71 at the moment there is no fast GPU Version out there. I’ll wait till its fast again.
I dont want to fight with you for facts or nothing.
The Only Thing that counts is the quality of the final image and not how much samples do you need or how much Hardware you got.
A Client pay for the final Image and not for the Sample count!
And dont forget i was rendering the scene with GPU and with CPU with your slow settings. I believe when i turn it down it will render much faster.
Its not my file. I was trying to tell you they arent my settings they are the developers.
2.71 is at least 3x faster for that file with cpu.
Its important to know your hardware because you could have a fast cpu and a slow gpu or the other way around. you could be comparing your new gpu to a 4 year old cpu or your high end cpu to your mid range gpu
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute… ©
Does it mean my 2×770 GTX are crawling rescently in 2.70?))
So, is the 750 ti better than the GTX 780m? Because my 780m is still working great with Blender.
no its not better i dont know it. but i think 780 GTX could be better i dont know. THe 750 TI OC is a in house overclocked card
Hmm, ok. Being an in-house over-clock, its possible that the 750 ti OC is better.
Maybe i dont know. ;)
i havnt seen a mobile GTX 780 on the benchmarks.
you should run it http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?331149-The-new-Cyles-GPU-2-70-Benchmark
Cool, I’ll try it out!
I plan on getting a new GPU, I’ve narrowed down my choices to:
EVGA GeForce GTX760
and
EVGA GeForce GTX660
Ultimately, income will determine which I choose, but my question is would I also have to patch blender in order to make Cycles function? Also, and other compatibility issues I should know about ahead of time?
Thanks
I dropped in a GTX660 recently, and it’s worked very nicely, though I’m no rendering powerhouse and just learning cycles.
If you use the latest build of blender – version 2.71 you dont need to patch, because the developer support it now. If you will wait till release of 2.71 so you have to use 2.70 and that means you need a patch. I think
I was one of the few investing on an Nvidia Quadro 4000. Reading this post I wanted to bet on the Nvidia GTX 750 ti. Result, the last is twice faster than the Quadro in the same computer :-(
With Quadro 4000 it takes 2 minutes to render the Mercedes on an Intel 7i with 32GB.
With the 750 it takes 1 minute.
With both GPUs it takes 40 seconds.
Maybe I should sell the Quadro and buy 2 additional 750 :-)