Nvidia Ampere Cards Supposed Specs and More.

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  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,715
    marble said:
    marble said:

     

    If anyone is holding off a purchase waiting for ampere you could be in for a long wait. 

    The crux of the rendering issue for me is twofold:

    1. To be able to render a scene without it dropping to CPU due to exceeding the VRAM.

    2.To be able to render a short (circa 100 frame) animation, with reasonable resolution, in a reasonable time. I don't call overnight a reasonable time - mainly because I often render a clip and find there are things that need tweaking.

    I get the impression that Ampere will not provide me with more VRAM at a similar price point to my 1070 so I have to hope for other technology such as out-of-core. You and the other tech-heads can argue about whether that is possible or not but it is on my wishlist. Perhaps they can improve the denoiser but at the moment I don't use it because, even for animations, it spoils the look of the image (wet skin becomes polished plastic). Perhaps there is a better compression algorithm. I don't know enough (anything) about this technology so it is all a wishlist. 

    So, other avenues are possibly available to addres my two points. I might move my scene over to Blender and use Eevee to render an animation. The Diffeomorphic plugin is being discussed elsewhere on the forum but I've just learned that, while it is doing a fine job converting materials to render in Cycles, it doesn't cater for Eevee. That's a disappointment and a possible show-stopper because, as far as I am aware, Cycles is no quicker than IRay. Another alternative being discussed if Google Filament and this is, perhaps, the best hope for animation within DAZ Studio even before Ampere. Again, I know nothing of the technology beyond what I read on these pages.

    I think a 100 frame animation in any PBR is always going to take a lot of HW or a lot of time. By the time the HW gets to the point where one mid range consumer card can render a 1080p clip in a few minutes everyone will be on 4k and so on. If this is strictly a hobby then there are going to be limits on what can be accomplished. If you make money off this then there are serious options for getting render times down.

    4x Quadro 8000's should make shortish work of any animation of the length andscale you are talking about and that would give you 96Gb to work with. If $25 to 30k is too rich for you, it is I'm sure, you could look at a pair of 2070 Supers and NVLink. That's between 14 and 16Gb, and substantially more than double the CUDA of your 1070, at about $1100.

     

    I still believe there may be a compromise route. Compromise some quality for speed without suffering the IRay denoiser problems. After all, game engines have to render real time so some of that technology might be applicable. Who knows what Filament might bring?

    Of course $25k is too rich for me - I had to abandon my annual holiday to buy the 1070 and I'll probably have to do the same to upgrade.I also have to move home soon which can be expensive. I'd be interested to compare the twin 2070 Supers against a new Ampere though - especially when the prices start to fall on the 20xx range.

    Game render engines pre-render stuff too, so they aren't always compromising, just hiding the work-rounds.

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679
    kyoto kid said:
    Sevrin said:

    So I went through the 8 GTC videos and... there wasn't any guidance about desktop GPUs to be found.  Did I miss something?

    I tried to stress that this was a professional event, and that no gaming cards would be announced. But that there could be hints.

    We didn't get a lot of hints. But yes, the new DGX is $200K. That sounds like a lot, but it is HALF the price of the last DGX, and offers so much more performance. Its insane. Now consider this, Nvidia just cut the price in half, I believe that bodes well for us in the consumer market. I am not saying Nvidia is going to cut the prices in half, LOL, but as I said already, the prices will certainly not be going up this generation. We might get lucky and see some small drops.

    Also, after the keynote, Jensen gave us the information that Ampere will be used as the basis for their entire GPU line, meaning that YES, gamers will be getting Ampere. We can confirm this now. Obviously there are changes in going from whats in the DGX to a 3080ti, but the core arch is going to be the same. Watch out for any Quadro reveals, I was hoping we would get new Quadros, but that did not happen. The Quadros are largely equivalent to what gaming cards will be.

    The Nvlink used in DGX is not anything at all like the Nvlink used in Quadro or gaming. So its not going be nearly as fast. But I would expect it to be faster than the Turing Nvlinks were.

     

    marble said:

     

    If anyone is holding off a purchase waiting for ampere you could be in for a long wait. 

    The crux of the rendering issue for me is twofold:

    1. To be able to render a scene without it dropping to CPU due to exceeding the VRAM.

    2.To be able to render a short (circa 100 frame) animation, with reasonable resolution, in a reasonable time. I don't call overnight a reasonable time - mainly because I often render a clip and find there are things that need tweaking.

    I get the impression that Ampere will not provide me with more VRAM at a similar price point to my 1070 so I have to hope for other technology such as out-of-core. You and the other tech-heads can argue about whether that is possible or not but it is on my wishlist. Perhaps they can improve the denoiser but at the moment I don't use it because, even for animations, it spoils the look of the image (wet skin becomes polished plastic). Perhaps there is a better compression algorithm. I don't know enough (anything) about this technology so it is all a wishlist. 

    So, other avenues are possibly available to address my two points. I might move my scene over to Blender and use Eevee to render an animation. The Diffeomorphic plugin is being discussed elsewhere on the forum but I've just learned that, while it is doing a fine job converting materials to render in Cycles, it doesn't cater for Eevee. That's a disappointment and a possible show-stopper because, as far as I am aware, Cycles is no quicker than IRay. Another alternative being discussed is Google Filament and this is, perhaps, the best hope for animation within DAZ Studio even before Ampere. Again, I know nothing of the technology beyond what I read on these pages.

     

    Frankly I would be switching render engines for animation. Unless Iray gets a drastic change, you would be so much better off using something else for animation. Have you seen the Unreal 5 demo? This demo is exciting not just because it looks nice, but how they did it. Listen closely to this video.

    Some of you may think I am crazy for even bringing up a video game engine and comparing it to Iray. But I've been telling you guys for years that game engines are rapidly progressing, and Unreal 5 represents a whole new level of design.

    The biggest breakthrough: They can drop RAW super high poly geometry and 8K+ size textures into Unreal 5 and the engine is capable of smartly using them without blowing up the VRAM budget and killing performance. They do not have to optimize them for performance and VRAM! This one single change is such a huge breakthrough. It is going to change everything. And all of this was running on a PS5. The PS5 is going to be fast, but its not going to beat a 2080ti. Its more like a 2070 or 2070 Super in GPU power. Its going to have about 12GB of VRAM, so roughly the 2080ti in capacity. And here it is with Unreal 5 rendering billions of triangles and massive 8K textures that a super computer might choke on, all at 30 frame per second at about 1440p (there was some dynamic resolution scaling). That is 1800 frames per minute. Maybe a 2080ti could bump it up to 4K resolution. This is a modern game engine.

    Oh, and because the geometry is so high, they do not even use normal maps. They are not needed anymore. That is how good the geometry is in this demo.

    Does anybody here believe that Iray can do this? I don't think Iray could perform like this if you used one of the new $200K Amphere DGX boxes, LOL. Not even in interactive mode. Iray is rapidly becoming a dinosaur.

    So instead of begging for more VRAM, why can't we have the render software handle this data more intelligently? This is what we should be asking for.

    ...I saw this yesterday and while I was extremely impressed with the "cinematic" quality of both the mesh generation and lighting engines, it all came down to the appearance of characters as it usually does with a game engine as I feel they fall short of matching the detail of the setting. She looked like a "game character" inserted into a highly photo real world.  A year or so ago ago I watched a demo of the Uniity engine and the scene (an interior setting in a room of a house) looked fantastic...until a character was inserted.  For some reason, the skin and hair textures in particular just seemed to be sub-par compared to the appearance of the surroundings.  Though I realise these engines can render quickly even with full GI while not placing such a drain on system resources as say Iray does, this one point has made me reluctant to work with them as much of my illustration work is character based.

    So yeah, still putting those zlotys away for that Turing RTX Titan.

    The key thing to remember is this is just a demo, and a quick one at that. Most of these assets were straight from the Quixel asset store that Epic now owns. So really, this demo advertised Quixel as much as it did UE5.

    As such, the game character was sort of an after thought. Her fluid motions were another advertised part of the engine, but she is still just a quick mock up character. This demo is not going to be in any production or anything.

    I believe we'll be seeing some pretty photoreal characters in this generation. We are getting close already. Take a look at Resident Evil Remake 2 and 3, in some cinematic scenes the characters really do look fantastic, and consider this is with now older PS4 level hardware.

    Another thing to consider is that games are, well, games. They are running at a high frame, and they have to be prepared for all the random things that can happen under the player's control. But most of us here are not making games. Some of you just want to render animation, and that changes things a lot. You don't have to render at high frame rates, even 10 renders per second would be a blistering pace for animation. You can always adjust speed in post. You can turn on all the bells and whistles that a normal game cannot, so you can create much more realistic images.

    Unreal 5 is coming in 2021. Its going to take some time for games to fully utilize it. So you probably will not see too many games using it until 2022 or later. But make no mistake, its coming. 

    Anyway, we have some specs to look at. This is the full GA100 chip:

    • 8 GPCs, 8 TPCs/GPC, 2 SMs/TPC, 16 SMs/GPC, 128 SMs per full GPU
    • 64 FP32 CUDA Cores/SM, 8192 FP32 CUDA Cores per full GPU
    • 4 third-generation Tensor Cores/SM, 512 third-generation Tensor Cores per full GPU

    Now the gaming cards will not feature this massive chip. The top tier 3080ti (and Quadro) would be on a GA102 chip, not the GA100. But we do expect it to have a good 5000+ cores. The actual core counts can change literally day to day, and Nvidia could wait as late as a month before launch to decide on final specs. But we know the absolute ceiling. Personally I think the Titan Ampere is a wild card. They could make it like the Titan RTX which was GT102 just like the 2080ti. Or they could make a Titan V type of monster and use the GA100 for it (but remember the Titan V was $3000.)

    Another point to take away here is that some rumors had pinpointed that Ampere would have 8192 cores. That means, the rumors were correct. That gives some credibility to the other rumors on performance discussed, like 4x faster ray tracing. I still think that's optimistic, but I would expect at least a doubling, or 3x increase there. The 4x could be under optimal conditions. And that is just ray tracing, not overall performance, don't confuse the two. But we know that ray tracing cores work really well for Iray. I believe this will make large complex scenes render pretty darn fast. The rumors had also suggested 10GB VRAM for the 3080, and 12ish for the 3080ti. I think the 3080ti might actually get a little more than that, just a little. We'll see.

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    Even the A-100 card doesn't get the full GA-100 chip.

    It is cut down from the full chip. For instance it only gets 6912 CUDA. I think Nvidia is struggling with the yield on this giant chips.

    Since the GA-100 will only go in the A-100 I think Nvidia posting the specs for a full GA-100 that will never exist "in the wild" is more than a tad deceptive.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,873
    edited May 2020

    ....basically I had some suggest using to Unity or Unreal for rendering large involved single frame scenes as using GI and high quality mode, they were faster than Iray.  The demo I watched was basically a still frame scene, no motion except for the camera, and even though the character was more detailed than the usual decimated character for game purposes, the textures still didn't hold up to the quality of the setting, making it almost look like it was pasted in.than an integral element of the scene. It might have to do with the materials as no doubt materials from DAZ/Iray would not work and have to be translated to whatever the game engine uses, or whatever, but the figure just didn't look as convincing as the surroundings it was in. 

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • Kevin SandersonKevin Sanderson Posts: 1,643
    edited May 2020

    3 minutes per frame is an excellent render time. I can remember grinding out animations in DAZ Studio at 10 to 15 minutes per frame in 3DL. Rendered all night but it came out well. Maybe I'll have more time as I continur to recover from my stroke last June. 

     

    Post edited by Kevin Sanderson on
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    3 minutes per frame is an excellent render time. I can remember grinding out animations in DAZ Studio at 10 to 15 minutes per frame in 3DL. Rendered all night but it came out well. Maybe I'll have more time as I continur to recover from my stroke last June. 

     

    I remove everything that is out of shot and try not to include polygon-heavy props and clothes in the shot. I reduce texture sized using Scene Optimizer. I reduce the render size to 1200x960 (5:4 ratio) which is half the resolution of my stills (I can enlarge using Topaz Gigapxel if necessary). I try to make sure that the characters are not so close to the camera so as to fill the frame with skin (close-ups take forever to render). I try to light using only a spotlight (maybe two). If I need ambient light I will use the Paper Tiger X-Ray camera to let the HDRi light in. Lately it seems that a mixture of Ghost Lights and Photometric slows the render significantly - don't know why.

    I use these other render settings:

    Usually limit the number of samples (200) or the Converged Ratio (80%) or the Max Time (3 mins) and see how it looks. Then I tweak them again.

    Max Path Length I set to 8. (I don't know that tis makes much difference though)

    Firefly Filter = On, Nominal Luminace = 500, No Denoiser, Pixel Filter = Mitchell, Pixel Filter Radius = 1.0

    Tone Mapping = defaults

    Environment = Scene Only (or sometimes I use one of the plain Painters Lights HDR lights).

    With all that I would hope for a render time of 3 minutes with two characters (G8F and/or G3M) in the scene.

  • Kevin SandersonKevin Sanderson Posts: 1,643

    You're on the right track, Marble! You just have to accept you're getting much better render times than most major studios, as I always look at it. I figure if something is worth rendering at full frame resolution, who ever wants it can pay for what's needed to do that. The important stuff is how you make your characters move, lighting, story if there is one, etc. For that smaller resolutions will do. 

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,744

    3 minutes per frame is an excellent render time. I can remember grinding out animations in DAZ Studio at 10 to 15 minutes per frame in 3DL. Rendered all night but it came out well. Maybe I'll have more time as I continur to recover from my stroke last June. 

     

    Looks like Samatha from Silent Witness.

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