Blender Render w/ GPU

ebergerly

For those who might bounce between D|S and Blender, I did some Cycles render tests to see what improvement (or "deprovement") my GTX 1070 would provide over my Ryzen 7 1700 CPU with 8 cores, 16 threads. 

Now the absolutely most important thing to know about rendering in Cycles with a GPU is this:

• You MUST crank up the Tiles setting (Render/Performance/Tiles X&Y) to a big number, like 256 or 512. If you don't, instead of taking 30 seconds your renders might take 30 MINUTES. I'm serious. And it's just the opposite for CPU rendering. Crank those numbers down to maybe 16 or so.

​So with that out of the way, I threw an icosphere and a plane in an empty scene, applied a glass shader (Cycles) to the icosphere and just a texture to the plane, threw in an HDR, and did some renders. 

The results were that the GPU (if configured correctly...) cut my render time in half, compared to the Ryzen 7 1700. With the CPU rendering flat out (all CPU's at 100%), and Tiles set to 16, it rendering in almost exactly 1 minute. With tiles set to 256, the GPU rendered in almost exactly 30 seconds. 

nonesuch00

ebergerly said:

For those who might bounce between D|S and Blender, I did some Cycles render tests to see what improvement (or "deprovement") my GTX 1070 would provide over my Ryzen 7 1700 CPU with 8 cores, 16 threads. 

Now the absolutely most important thing to know about rendering in Cycles with a GPU is this:

• You MUST crank up the Tiles setting (Render/Performance/Tiles X&Y) to a big number, like 256 or 512. If you don't, instead of taking 30 seconds your renders might take 30 MINUTES. I'm serious. And it's just the opposite for CPU rendering. Crank those numbers down to maybe 16 or so.

​So with that out of the way, I threw an icosphere and a plane in an empty scene, applied a glass shader (Cycles) to the icosphere and just a texture to the plane, threw in an HDR, and did some renders. 

The results were that the GPU (if configured correctly...) cut my render time in half, compared to the Ryzen 7 1700. With the CPU rendering flat out (all CPU's at 100%), and Tiles set to 16, it rendering in almost exactly 1 minute. With tiles set to 256, the GPU rendered in almost exactly 30 seconds. 

Shouldn't Blender be allowing to create 2 default settings for parameters based on whether it was CPU or GPU based render?

ebergerly

Actually there's a plugin that automatically sets the tile size for you depending on your render parameters, so not a big deal if you remember to enable it.