AMDs FireRender Engine and Daz3D
artphobe
Posts: 97
Heya everyone,
As we all know currently we have 2 flavours of rendering engines built in Daz Studio and 1 external.
Internal:
3Delight
iRay by nVidia
External
Reality bridge that uses LuxRender
AMD announced yesterday their 'workstation' class GPU for rendering in their tech product launch and it in they mentioend FireRender - a physically-based rendering engine based on OpenCL. Their product launch basically showed the 3Ds Max software rendering a car scene using the FireRenderer engine. FireRender is apparently part of AMD's GPUOpen intitiative which means it can be used freely by devs and it is open source and hardware neutral.
I started googling and it seems it was introduced around 2015, and is very similar to nvidia's iray.
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/graphics-development/firepro-sdk/amd-firerender-technology/
It seems pretty similar to what LuxRender does though, the question is, any plans for Daz Studios to get this implemented in their future releases?
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Comments
It would be cool if they did; not being tied to IRAY for a physically based rendering with internal support would be cool.
I wouldn't be surprised if DAZ didn't have a sweetheart deal with nVidia that might prevent this. I would think the combination of a test platform and quite a few additional GPU sales has been good for Iray.
I think the way it works currently is someone needs to get working on the AMD-Daz relation directly.
AMD's offerings are being implemented in an indirect way - through Paolo's team (Reality) and LuxRender (OpenCL) working in collaboration.
Whilst bussinesses do such things; it is speculation. Makes sense tbh. At the moment, I'd be buying Nvidia even though I'm more of an AMD fan, purely because of the performance/cooler and power consumption. AMD are making inroads, and the new memory architecture may help change things, but they aren't there yet.
I waited for them to address the issues with their cards for Cycles in Blender; I waited for years for them to do it before I finally bought Nvidia. This looks a really viable and awesome initiative, and I hope it works out for them; I like competition, it keeps a company on their toes, and intel and nvidia have been having it more their own way the last two/three years - or more in the case of intel.
Yea it seems that way too. I wish AMD would try to contact Daz though more aggressively try to get something done.
According to their product launch, AMD was working with another platform called Limitless for content creation - which sounded alot like Daz Studios the difference being Limitless was more geared towards interactivity and VR.
Here's the part on FireRender
AMD's been trying really hard recently to get developers attention, and with their forming of the Radeon Technology Group, hopefully they can give more attention to this side of the story too.
Maybe they should send a bunch of those machines to Daz Studios :D
I felt this way as well about Daz and Iray. Regardless I don't think I'd be buying a AMD GPU over Nvidia right now where the hardware market sits.
AMD would have to prove themselves with a little more than "iniitiatives" before anythiing can be done first of all. Second, there's quite enough renderers to support so adding another for vendors to do would be a definite no. Iray is the official renderer and when that renderer can take mdl scripts from 3ds max, maya, and the Substance products (that use iray) it makes no sense to even consider working off someone's announcements.
Now if some 3rd party wishes to make a plugin, that would be a more feasible option.
There is one other render engine available for DS - Octane Render. It's a commercial product, and not free (or the typical DS price), but it is an outstanding gpu based unbiased render engine. It currently only supports Nvidia/Cuda, but they are adding OpenCL support for version 3. Octane currently supports out of core textures (meaning if you have a scene that requires more memory than you have on your GPU, sytem RAM can be used for the textures). It also has motion blur and several other features not available with Iray. Octane 3 will also have true volumetrics (great for realistic clouds and fire). Opencl support isn't available in the V3 beta yet, but volumetrics are, and have been implemented in both the DS and Carrara plugins. The Octane for Carrara plugin also has support for Carrara's dymamic hair.
Octane isn't cheap, but it is another alternative, with some features not available in Iray, and definitely worth mentioning when talking about alternative render engines for DS. It's also a bit faster than Iray, and easier on your system ...... it doesn't hardly touch the CPU when rendering, where Iray constantly uses 20-100% of one physical CPU core while renbering.
Is Octane also limited to VRAM for the Scene Size or can it also Use Main RAM like Reality/LUX
There are two Luxrender exporters...Luxus and Reality.
And there are a set of free scripts to export for Cycles rendering in Blender.
And, if I'm not mistaken, Cycles is going towards being GPU neutral by supporting both OpenCL and Cuda and is in fact the basis for Poser 11's SuperFly render engine.
Well, having an additional render INSIDE daz studio will be a pain in the a***s for Daz3d. That means more dev, more problems, more work, more maintenance, more material dev, etc... for a return almost equal to zero.
But, I think that seeing daz move to iRay last year, the company should (and HAS TO) go further in this direction. I mean iRay+, iRay server etc...more integration in daz, faster interaction with iray, more mats, etc...It will compete with octane. and it'll give some more consictency to the Daz market place, in the higher end market.
Since iray, I don't play anymore with 3dl. once you taste the hardware speed render, you can't go back. I'm expecting more in this direction. I hope that daz will invest upon the actual iray point of dev and NOT from the zero starting point of a new render engine.
What DAZ needs is for 3Delight to provide an option (and for DAZ to expose it) to do accelerated rendering on GPU (either through OpenCL, or whatever.) Then 3DL would simply be an alternative biased renderer to Iray being the unbiased one.
There *is* an OpenGL option within DAZ, but I'm not even sure as to what it does, haha :P
As for OpenGL support, I'm hoping that something does happen in the near future because async compute for nVidia is actually far behind AMD's offerings due to the way nVidia implemented their calls and timing.
That's an if/when...3DL has plans at maybe, some point, but not anytime soon, of implementing a GPU option...but as to when is anyone's guess.
I'm much more interested in Studio getting support for OSL. 3Delight now has full OSL support.
The OpenGL option is a basic GLSL renderer...but the shaders in it are very basic (and as far as I can tell not easily changed out for an expanded set). Think capabilities of late 90s through about 2005 games.
...I beleive that Octane has a Hybrid GPU/CPU mode which actually works pretty well and is still rather fast. What it does (again someone correct me if I am wrong) is when the GPU runs out memory the texture load is dumped to the CPU and Physical Memory.
As I recall with Lux, their development team abandoned Hybrid GPU/CPU rendering.over a year ago due to issues and the fact it didn't really impact rendering time all that much.
If it is opensource mabe a developer who like Pablo from reality could make this render engine work for daz and poser. A opengl upgrade for daz would be great for those people who cannot afford the high price tag of iray.
I kind of doubt it considering iray is heavily promoted in Daz, including the start up logo every time you start the program. I cannot imagine nvidia would want to see an AMD logo anywhere near theirs.
The most likely place to find any AMD solution will be an external renderer, not inside Daz. I'd like to see this happen at least, more options and more competition are good thing.
LOL, okay nevermind then :)
However, Luxus does serve as a near-native plugin for Luxrender, so perhaps it is possible to incorporate FireRender... there would be a need to redo materials to some degree, similar to Luxrender.
Yes, out of core textures with Octane means that Octane can use system RAM for texture data if there isn't enough GPU RAM available. So for texture (image) resorces you are only limited by the amount of RAM on your system. You may still run into a max polygon limit with version 2 because the geometry must reside in GPU memory, but that will be removed in Version 3 and will also be able to use System RAM for geometry. This means, for example, you can render a scene that requires 6Gb of "GPU" RAM in Octane with a 2GB GPU, with only a slight performance hit (typically 2-10% - usually on the lower end of the scale).
Just one quick side note, out of core textures isn't really the same as GPU/CPU Hybrid rendering in Lux. With Hybrid rendering both the GPU and the CPU are actively involved in the rnedering process. With Octane, out of core rendering simply refers to texture (image) data being stored in system RAM, The CPU is only used to help move requested texture data from system RAM to the GPU, and is not actively involved in the actual rendering process. While using out of core rendering my CPU doesn't even show 5% of the clock cycles going to Octane, so use of the CPU is virtually non-existant. With Hybrid in Lux, the CPU is used for render calculations as well as the GPU, often this approach gets little or no improvement in speed over CPU only rendering (and sometimes it is slower).
Just in case there's any confusion, OpenGL is what DAZ Studio uses for the viewport (before render) wheras OpenCL is the open source alternative to the proprietary Cuda from Nvidia. Luxrender uses OpenCL and is free although Reality or Luxus - which are plugins to allow DAZ Studio scenes to be rendered in Luxrender - are not free.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
My personal suspicion about Hybrid performance in Lux is that the CPU is serving the GPU data on demand instead of preloading the buffer and allowing CPU/GPU to process in parallel. I haven't actually looked LuxRender/LuxCore's code directly, but that's the only way I can explain the performance.
Played with it. Pretty neat actually. It is tightly integrated with 3DStudio max and materials are created through Shade (3dsmax node based shader/material builder). Here's the page on github: http://amdfirerender.github.io/
It's still in beta stages, so I think some features are not available yet (caustics, sub surface scattering, dispersion etc). I do like the capability to limit bounces and the node based approach. Needs models to be physically accurate, so I think most props available won't work correctly out of the box (single plane glass/windows etc).
Performance wise, it is pretty fast. Someone went and did a benchmark of Radeon Pro Duo and two GTX 980Ti with it.
From: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Pro-Duo-Review/Testing-Setup-and-Professional-Testing
It's completely free and planned to be open sourced. The source code should be available in the future. I know Render Legion is doing an implementation that will read Corona materials, which is great.