ATI/AMD release their own PBR Renderer for RADEON
hphoenix
Posts: 1,335
in The Commons
http://pro.radeon.com/en-us/radeon-prorender-available-for-autodesk-maya-coming-soon-for-blender/
Yep, Iray has competition. AMD/ATI Radeon now has ProRender, a Physically Based Rendering engine. It runs via OpenCL optimized for Radeon Graphics cards. Integration with Maya is done, Blender is coming soon.
....wonder if DS will get it too?
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Comments
Hmm...here's a plus...
I'll probably play with it in Blender when it's out of beta. Of course, that's always a route for rendering Studio assets with it..go through Blender.
I highly doubt you will see it in Studio since it already has its own PBR with Iray.. Though the only other way just not official so to speak would be like what Luxrender has with Reality or Luxus..
A couple of BIGGER pluses:
Thank god for that, maybe the prices will go down !!!!
Officially I would guess no. First iray is in DAZ Studio for free most likely through an agreement. 2nd PAs would most likely balk at the thought of supporting yet another renderer with shaders. Wouldn't stop someone from writing an interface if they're inclined though.
Pls correct me on this, but doesn't support for open standards like OpenCL mean that shaders would render consistently across all compliant rendering tools including game engines? If I am correct, then that would mean more PAs inclining towards that. Of course, it all depends on how much foothold the standards themselves are able to gain, but with support for OpenCL even in Nvidia's recent range (Geforce 980), I think Nvidia is also showing its acceptance.
More rendering options always a good thing IMHO
Any opinions as to what are the advantages of this engine over cycles??
Cycles is technically "hardware agnostic"
certainly more so than Iray.
And in branched pathtracing mode you get many options for customizing the number of bounces separately for Glossy ,Diffuse, Volume Caustic ,Subsurface and so on.
As a user of Daz Content auto conversion of DAZ materials to cycles node is paramount for me at least
The teleblender 3 script from MCasual is an excellent bridge for
Converting Daz Content materials to cycle nodes.
Remember Iray is the default official renderer for DAZ Studio. Also iray is supported in various applications including substance designer which more PAs are using to make content for the store. Unless iray supports openCL, you're asking PAs to throw away their tools and support something totally different that hasn't even been proven to be a viable alternative. I doubt that will happen. That said a third party could make an interface, but it won't have the support iray does because it's not the official renderer.
Also note that openCL performance until now has been buggy and not as efficient as iray and others CUDA-based products, which is why a lot more GPU renderers use CUDA. You probably have years until an OpenCL renderer proves it's worth against CUDA. It's not an "Oh look we can use our ATI cards" situation, it's a "will it perform as well before we switch?" one.
This could be a game-changer; all it needs to be is comparable to IRAY
If it is, and considering AMD cards consistently out-perform IRAY cards for certain tasks, and for much less cash, I will be watching this closely.
I've said before Nvidia are greedy with their pricing; so I welcome this.
I'm here at Daz in part because of how long it took for cycles to become a possibility on AMD; my frustration made me look around, and IRAY dropped at a convenient time. AMD have also traditionally, added more RAM to their cards than Nvidia, something to bare in mind.
PAs may not want to support more renderers, but markey forces are a funny thing.
I've been a purchser of shaders; that just might be greatly reduced now whilst I watch this develop.
The market here over the last year has invested heavily in iray. That's not going to change unless there's a bridge to change that investment over to other renderers. Cycles incorporating AMD cards was an issue because of OpenCL and its stability. AMD will have to make the same inroads into the tools made for iray, and that's going to take a while. In this part of the woods, it was a boon to get iray. To get AMD in you're going to have to pay them just like Octane.
The shader language provides the material definition with real world physical properties like index of refraction etc.
Glass in render engine A will look the same as glass in render engine B.
Nevertheless the "kernel" of the render engine may still make the image look different depending on qualiity and speed settings, noise filter, post production effects etc.
-> Many companies are currently trying to support common standards for shader languages.
MDL = Material Definition Language
OSL = Open Shader Language
OpenCL = Open Computing Language
- For the artists this could mean that they need to invest some time to learn how to set up shaders so they can not only be read in one render engine but also in others that support the same language.
- SDK need to be updated with import and export options for shader languages
Much work is allready done. Many companies have partnered up with AMD to provide solutions.
Example:
- Cuda is readable on AMD cards (since March 2016)
http://techfrag.com/2016/03/11/nvidias-cuda-language-can-now-run-on-amd-intel-gpus/#
But yes, AMD and partner companies are still in the process of working out some driver issues.
- - -
I do understand that people who learned Iray hope that this will be the solution the rest of the market will adopt.
But it seems not everyone was happy with all the decisions Nvidia made in the last years.
AMD started working with many different partners with the same goals:
- Customers should be able to use any graphic card they want with any software they want.
- Customers should be able to use the same shader language in many different render engines.
- - -
Maybe in 2020 the picture will be more clear which graphic cards, render engines and shader languages will be best suited for GPU rendering.
- Some companies are trying to work together to find common standards and technologies that work across multiple plattforms.
- Some companies may just be trying to get some money back for the research done with GPUs but do not seem that interested to invest significantly more money to improve their render solution.
- - -
-> If you are somewhat interested in GPU rendering you may want to have a look at many different shader languages and render engines and at least learn the basics of all of them.
The render engine may not matter that much anymore in the future.
What will matter is
-> Which shader language is supported by most render engines.
Just focusing on supporting one shader language may end up to be a dead end...
- - -
Perhaps, but supporting more than one render engine or shader language has to have financial incentive or it won't continue to happen. Isn't this the basic complaint already from 3Delight users about products in the store having only Iray shader presets? And with Poser users complaining about a lack of support in DAZ store content for Poser?
Thing is, right now there are two up and coming shader/material languages, OSL and MDL. RSL and single renderer languages are fading. Renderman is moving to using a programming language (C), instead of any shader language.
I don't see PRORender supporting MDL, as that belongs to Nvidia.
But if it supports OSL, then it, potentially, could share shaders among 3Delight (yes, it has OSL support now), Cycles and several others. And if OSL support is ever enabled in Studio, then it becomes much easier for other than Iray renderers to be supported. The same can be said for things tha support MDL...but that's still primarily Nvidia's offerings (not talking programs, but renderers).
Now if Poser Pro gets this it will seriously give Iray a run for its money. I like competition it promotes advancements. Monopolies are a dead end.
This is fantastic news. Maybe this can get Nvidia to start caring more about Iray and start to optimize it better. Competition is always a good thing.
This absolutely can have a major impact on Daz's market. If it performs better than Iray, or even just as well, it will make rapid in roads, no matter how entrenched Iray may be (and to be frank, I don't believe it is at all, Daz is the only place where Iray is "King.") Ease of use will be a big factor, too.
There are a lot of users who install Daz Studio for one reason, and one reason only: Iray. Maybe some of these people end up buying something from Daz at some point. Everybody who installs Daz Studio is a potential Daz customer. That is the whole point of offering it for free, after all. So if people start moving towards an open source rendering platform that is also free, and can be used by any hardware with OpenGL, then this presents a serious threat to Daz.
GPU and CPU workload BALANCING. If this isn't just PR talk, Prorender will start strong out of the gate just for this reason alone.
I think this news is good for all of us, also for DAZ. Nvidia with Iray probably has taken DAZ by its "Anatomical Elements".
MDL is most likely going to be one of the two main PBR standards in the future, especially since 3DS is moving towards it. Having said that, ProRender supporting open standards will probably be a close second.
Having said all that, GPUOcelot used to be a way to simulate CUDA devices but development stopped a couple of years ago. Perhaps someone will pick up the project again to make it compatible with AMD GPUs since it's literally a JIT compiler for various CUDA instructions.
First time I've seen the use of anatomical elements make sense. :)
I won't argue with this, except to say that we don't really know that nVidia hasn't been working to optimize it all along.
Most folks that do renders in some pretty big name software have no idea what rendering engine is involved; they just use the tools provided to do their job. If those tools just so happen to be Iray and MDL based, so be it.
I don't agree that folks install DAZ Studio specifically for Iray; it just happens to come along for the ride now.
Maybe, but they still have to convince folks that have heard of the issues with Open CL that those no longer plague the software.
...and this troubles me as it means people like myself will have to deal with significantly longer, more system punishing CPU based render times in Iray than with 3DL. When I can render the same scene in 15 - 20 min using 3DL as opposed to 3 - 4 (or more hours) using Iray, in my book, the advantage goes to 3DL. So when say, something like an English country manor I've been waiting for is finally released, it most likely will be only with Iray shaders making it useless as there is now conversion tool for 3DL (and probably will never be one).
Short of receiving a moderate windfall, I really don't see myself having a system with powerful GPU like a 1080 Ti, Pascal Titan X for performing GPU rendering. Crikey it's going to cost me more than I can afford on my budget just to upgrade my 4 year old workstation to its maximum memory limit (24GB) let alone swap in a 6 core CPU, and there are no PCI 2.0 cards available with more than 3 GB GDDR5 which is pretty much useless.
Actually...they do. In fact Nvidia recommends it on their forums. There are several threads there where Nvidia people have told posters to grab Studio and play around with it. It's one of the best demos for Iray around.
The proof is in the results. Iray is still slow and heavily dependent on having high end hardware...which just happens to be exclusive to Nvidia GPUs. I feel very strongly that Iray is poorly optimized, not necessarily on purpose, but the software is still rather new. Its only been in public use for a couple years. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that as fairly recent software, it can be significantly improved. Nvidia has proven that when they are inspired, they can deliver. They used software, and software alone, to make their recent Pascal GPU line deliver 3 times the performance of the previous generation in VR, when it only delivers a modest gain in performance with normal games. They did that because VR is supposed to be the next big thing. VR, like Iray, is largely new in its recent form. It should be clear that Nvidia is dedicating most of their time to VR and other things.
What big name companies are specifically using Iray for their rendering needs? How many movies have been made with Iray? This also ties into point #1. If more companies were looking at Iray, Nvidia would be more inspired to improve it faster. Its a niche market to them. Nvidia was quick to announce Daz was using Iray. They also happily announced PGO was using Iray for renderings of their fancy little cars. But beyond that, there are very few announcements like this. So that begs the question, who is using it? Its certainly not big in animation. I for one do not believe the market is saturated in any one direction or the other, because so many companies use so many different softwares and the big ones create their own.
I didn't say that everyone chose Daz for Iray. But a lot do. Whether it be because of Iray outright, or they see the pretty picture renders made by other users and look to see what program is making them (because its free.) How many other programs offer free PBR rendering? Not many. Nvidia uses Daz to promote Iray, which in turn promotes Nvidia GPUs (because you want to render faster, right?)
Anyone who discriminates against a software because they harbor outdated beliefs isn't really keeping up with the times. If you work in the business then you are very well aware that things change and can change very rapidly. What might be laughed at one day becomes the next big thing, and they are left in the cold because they didn't jump on board fast enough. Pity.
Hey KK,
You can use a PCI 3 card in a PCI 2 slot. With Iray there will be a very slight delay for scene loading on PCI 2 vs PCI 3 (not really noticable), but once the the data loads to the GPU, the speed differences will be negligable. So you could upgrade to a 1070 with 8gb and render most of your scenes really fast (the actual GPU RAM used will be less than what DS is using for 3Delight renders). But you would need to increase your RAM to 16Gb or more to support your scenes sizes.
I have suggested it to 3D studio Max users on youtube too who posted on Nvidia videos about how dear their plugin is!
Maybe some might go to darkside even and buy DAZ content!!
The thing the realize is that the speed issues lie in OpenCL,not Iray. Also the stability issues are there too. And Iray is in the very places that this AMD renderer wants to be: Maya, 3DS max, the new renderer in the Allegorithmic products, etc. As long as the renderer is tied to OpenCL, as long as that standard isn't improved neither will be the output. But depending on the complexity of your scene CPU isn't going to be much of a difference in Iray as 3DL (such as transmapped hair.. I know I can use some of the hairs that used to be 3DL renderers to a crawl with Iray. Cycles has issues with transmaps as well). I'm sure performance and features will improve espeically since we are using iray far differently than other GPU/Unbiased renderers: for rendering people and skin instead of architectual buildings and cars.. which is where iray/Mental ray is normally used. DAZ Studio is mostly likely leading the way for rendering people and with that knowledge Nvidia can improve how the software works. For example the 4.9 update, there was a change on how SSS is done. I doubt the other software has such a userbase and I doubt anyone will toss that knowledge for something that they will have to work from scratch to address this section of the industry's needs.
Let's see; Pixar is using OptiX and CUDA (not Iray specifically), Autodesk 3DS Max Mental Ray has Iray support, as does Autodesk Maya. Solidworks is another software package that uses it and their are a few others listed besides DAZ Studio.
Considering I have an all AMD system with a Radeon card, I'll be watching this. I can't afford an nVidia card right now. I'll figure out how to do my own shaders if I have to. I've been figuring out the 3DL and the Iray shaders, one more isn't going to kill me. I may groan a bit, but I'll live. If it happens and I can use my current setup, even better. If my renders are faster, I'll jump for joy because they literally drag at times now with CPU only renders.
..ahh, I knew you could use memory rated at a higher clock speed but it would be limited to the MB's default setting (unless you make the proper adjustment in the BIOS). Does make sense.
As I have a 6 slot triple channel board it would still be better to go to the maximum of 24 otherwise I'd be running only in dual channel mode (which is not as efficient) just in case one of my epic sized scenes dumps from the GPU or when I'm working in CarraraPro 64. Also read that maxing out a 6 slot LGA 1366 board at 16 GB is not a good Idea. Hence I will still need that 140$ W7 Pro OEM. If I have to get a new MB, I may as well then just build an entirely new system.
I also understand, if you use a secondary GPU to run the displays then your rendering card doesn't take a hit to the VRAM from the OS (which albeit in W7 is pretty minimal compared to W10). I'm not as concerned about the number of CUDA Cores as I am having enough memory on the card to hold most of my scenes particularly since a 1080 is 200$ more expensive on average (and I'm sure the 1080 Ti will probably be another 200$ more than that). The other advantage, at peak load the 1070 consumes 10w less than my old 460 does, so I wouldn't have to swap out the PSU I have (750 W) running both (and the 460 wouldn't be pushed at all). In all, it would be about a 700$ expense for everything.
Maxon (Cinema 4D) announced in October that ProRender will become their new Internal GPU renderer.
http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/10/maxon-picks-amds-radeon-prorender-for-cinema-4d/
However if you read the article the main reason isn't for performance but for macs users. But if you look at the mac prices you're looking at a $5,000 mac pro before you get even move than 3GB of memory for rendering and I'm not sure if Apple patched the issue with OpenCL cards with rendering on their Last OS. The serious GPU rendering plugins are still going to be iray and Octane in Cinema4D.