Tesla k10/k20 for iray Daz 4.10

RemiliaSutton

I’ve just recently received a Tesla k10 and looking at a k20 and I have a quadro k600 and would like to make more use of them. My question is will Tesla k10/k20 work with iray on Daz 4.10?? Just curious is all

kenshaw011267

It should. You'll need a motherboard designed to support Tesla cards. Nvidia has a list of supported boards, they're all server boards just so you know.

outrider42

They will work. They can even be used in regular motherboards because they are pcie. But these are enterprise cards and need their own special drivers. You should not use a Geforce card with a Tesla in the same machine. So this forces you into a very specialized and expensive ecosystem.

These cards are old. Their biggest advantage over GTX for Iray was their VRAM, but that was back in 2012. That advantage is long gone now as even mid range GTX cards like the 1070 match the K10's 8GB VRAM. The K10 is also clocked very low, as these are intended for stability. So newer GTX cards will also be much, much faster at rendering. So that same 1070 is like twice or more as fast for most tasks and probably that much faster for Iray, too. Tesla's also lack any video output, so you do need something for video, I guess that's why you are looking at the small Quadro.

Instead of going down this rabbit hole, I would advise just going with gaming cards for Iray. I don't believe Tesla has any special advantage when it comes to Iray, so you wont be better served by it in any way. You can totally try it out if you want to, nothing is stopping you, but I don't think its the best choice.

Kitsumo

Yeah, I saw this post last night and I didn't want to be a party pooper, but since someone else brought it up, https://technical.city/en/video/GeForce-GTX-1070-vs-Tesla-K10 . The 1070 out classes the k10 in almost every way. The main thing the K10 has going for it is double precision floating point performance, which Daz Studio (and every rendering engine I can think of) doesn't even use. Plus, Nvidia is dropping support for Fermi in Iray, so Keppler could be on the chopping block next.

kenshaw011267

outrider42 said:

They will work. They can even be used in regular motherboards because they are pcie. But these are enterprise cards and need their own special drivers. You should not use a Geforce card with a Tesla in the same machine. So this forces you into a very specialized and expensive ecosystem.

 

These cards are old. Their biggest advantage over GTX for Iray was their VRAM, but that was back in 2012. That advantage is long gone now as even mid range GTX cards like the 1070 match the K10's 8GB VRAM. The K10 is also clocked very low, as these are intended for stability. So newer GTX cards will also be much, much faster at rendering. So that same 1070 is like twice or more as fast for most tasks and probably that much faster for Iray, too. Tesla's also lack any video output, so you do need something for video, I guess that's why you are looking at the small Quadro.

 

Instead of going down this rabbit hole, I would advise just going with gaming cards for Iray. I don't believe Tesla has any special advantage when it comes to Iray, so you wont be better served by it in any way. You can totally try it out if you want to, nothing is stopping you, but I don't think its the best choice.

Someone else tried to get Tesla cards working and couldn't. Nvidia is the source of the need for specific boards, the capabilities needed were described in that thread.

outrider42

Well, that's one use case. A problem for sure is the general lack of documentation on this subject. It is hard to find anyone talking about it. But there are benchmarks for Tesla cards in the Octane benchmark database, so somebody has used Teslas for rendering.

I also thought of another potential issue even the k10 does work, the k10 is a dual GPU. It has two 4GB GPUs on one board. So the actual amount of VRAM available might only be 4GB instead of 8. If this is correct, that makes the k10 an even worse deal for rendering!

As I said, its probably not a good idea regardless, and it sounds worse and worse by the minute. Just buy a newer gaming card and all will be well. You could keep the Tesla as a collector item (hey, how many people can say they have a Tesla GPU?) or just sell it. Sell the k10 and use the money to buy a modern (and much better) GPU.