Iray and VRAM
joseft
Posts: 310
So i just hit the VRAM limit on my video cards for the first time, so now i am sad.
Before i cave and go and spend money - that i should be saving - on seriously beefing up my machine, does anyone have any gossip on Iray development? I would imagine they are trying to develop an out-of-core solution similar to that of Octane to get around the VRAM limitations of young GPU based engines - would love to know if that is in the pipeline before i go and spend money. Other option is to go back to using Octane again, but i find the Iray integration to be too convenient to abandon.
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If you do not hit the limit too often, you can always try the various tricks to reduce the memory usage in the scenes that do blow the limit, or failing that, hide some sections, render in layers, and then recombine the image using post work.
Why?
Yeah, it's called Pascal cards....they'll have upto 32 GB of memory.
Thankyou. Just did some research into that, and they look amazing. I'll hold off for a couple of those....hoping the rumours about Q2 2016 release are accurate
The big memory capacities won't be here for a while.
It looks like nVidia are holding off on the new HBM2 memory and will stick with GDDR5 and 8GB.
Saving the big stuff for the 'new' Titan model.
DDR5 is still quite expensive stuff right now. I don't expect a 32GB card to be in the hobbyist price range for the first few iterations of that line of cards.
the dual gpu 24GB Nvidia Tesla is still $4.3K - $4,900.00 US and it's actually two banks of 12GB per GPU so it's a 12GB Iray limit.
AMD already has a line of FirePro 32GB cards (all 32 usable by a single GPU) some for under $4,000.00 but it doesn't help the Iray crowd. AMD gets written off all-to-often in these forums, but AMD was the first to break 1GHz. with a CPU, not Intel. AMD was the first to put 32GB DDR5 on a GPU, not Nvidia.
All of this is way out of my price range and besides I'm still budgeting for that Les Paul Custom.
Raman noodles here I come!
Just to gossip a little:
[Speculation]
Otoy is rumored to have found a way to make CUDA work on AMD cards.
This means in theory not only OctaneRender but also Iray could use AMD cards to render in the near future.
Otoy may do everything in their power to make this work with OctaneRender so they are not anymore that dependent on Nvidia.
Question is if Nvidia will update Iray in a similar way to be run on AMD cards?
[/Speculation]
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Less speculation and more facts are hopefully released at the GPU Technology Conference 2016, April 4-7:
http://www.gputechconf.com/
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-> If you are not that in a hurry to make video card purchase decisions it may be worth the while to wait after GTC.
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There are a lot of thing you can do to handle big scenes that are to big for memory.
First of all invest the Money for http://www.daz3d.com/iray-memory-assistant to get an Idea what eats up the memory.
Then there are a lot of things you can do to reduce VRAM usage:
- Hide stuff outside the Camera View
- Reduce SubD levels or remove Normal Maps (you can often do this without noticable effect if the items in question are not in close up
- Hide things (e.g. People or probs ) in one part of the picture do a render, Then unhide and hide those in another part of the Picture. Do another render and combine in PS/Gimp (Layering)
I work with 2 970s with 4GB each and I always fight with Vram usage, but with some experience it is pretty easy to handle.