Announcing Redshift - Biased GPU Renderer

[Cacoman]

Well, the advantages of the Titan over the GTX 780 are the following

200 More CUDAS
6 gigs against 3 gigs RAM

But the memory bandwith is the same 288.4 GB/sec

So the Titan will render a little bit faster than the 780, and is able to allocate more memory for textures, rays, etc. But frankly, before the Titan I had a GTX470 with 2 gigs in RAM and never got in trouble.

The reports from a guy having both the Titan and the 780 is that the speed is the same, due to the same memory bandwith.

I went to the nvidia site to check on this, and I just found the GTX 690. I haven't seen that before. I guess is new. But from what I just read from the specs sheet, seems to me that actually this one is the winner.

3072 CUDAS vs 2688 of the Titan
Both 6 Gigs
and the memory bandwith is higher than the Titan.
384 gigs/sec vs 288.4 of the Titan.

Damned!!! This was not around when I bought the Titan....

[Falam]

The 690 came before the Titan, it is more similar to a dual card setup. As for regular, model, texturing, ICE operations, a 5xx,6xx,7xx series cards are more then adequate. If you want the extra RAM, you could spend the $1K (US) on a Titan, I don't really think it is worth it unless you are doing major GPU rendering, as with RedShift as you do.

[scaron]

@cacoman, @draise... thanks for the feedback, i will just need to try it myself.

my questions are because of how arnold and vray are integrated into softimage, its not their fault sometimes it is softimage's fault because their sdk doesn't provide the necessary granularity to match the mental ray integration. the scenarios i outline are difficult areas of the sdk in regards to rendering plugins, i wanted to see if redshift has the same issues or if they have workaround these issues

s

[ActionArt]

If I understand you correctly, no it does not have the same issues. I'll check further to see if this is the case. Integration is much like MR (better in many ways) and if you modify something on a big scene it does not seem to have to re-transfer the entire scene.

[ActionArt]

-if you have a large scene with many objects and you do a modeling change on one object, does the entire scene need to be reprocessed/exported?
-is instancing supported? through ICE?
-what happens when you do modeling changes to an object which is instanced?
-is there a fly through mode? ie. do you have to re export the scene every time the frame changes even if it is static?
-what happens if you import an softimage model from disk? does the entire scene need to be reprocessed/exported?

1) No, it does not seem to. I'll check further. It exports very fast with minor changes so I think not.
2) Yes, instancing is well supported. For ICE, I think so, will check.
3) Yes there is a flythrough mode. Even without flythrough, only changes to the scene are exported. It's very fast. (less than a second or two in most cases).
4) I don't think so. Will check.

Only partially helpful but I'll look into it further.

[Kzin]

without writing to much, the best thing about redshift compared to mr, all is working like it is intended. and you dont have to care about render features which the renderer can, but no one implemented it. you get whats on the renderers list because the renderer is under support which makes bugfixing alot faster.

[ActionArt]

I've had a chance to double check on some of this:

-if you have a large scene with many objects and you do a modeling change on one object, does the entire scene need to be reprocessed/exported?
-is instancing supported? through ICE?
-what happens when you do modeling changes to an object which is instanced?
-is there a fly through mode? ie. do you have to re export the scene every time the frame changes even if it is static?
-what happens if you import an softimage model from disk? does the entire scene need to be reprocessed/exported?

1) No. RS is smart enough to know what has changed and what hasn't.
2) Instances and ICE instancing are well supported.
3) Changes to instances seem to happen immediately.
4) There is a flythrough mode for lighting purposes but if the scene has animated parts only those parts are updated between frames which is very fast.
5) As with everything else, RS seems smart enough to know what has changed and what hasn't.

Hope that helps

[scaron]

I've had a chance to double check on some of this:

1) No. RS is smart enough to know what has changed and what hasn't.
2) Instances and ICE instancing are well supported.
3) Changes to instances seem to happen immediately.
4) There is a flythrough mode for lighting purposes but if the scene has animated parts only those parts are updated between frames which is very fast.
5) As with everything else, RS seems smart enough to know what has changed and what hasn't.

Hope that helps

yes, this does! thanks...

[El Burritoh]

Sorry I'm late here... I've just been so busy using Redshift on any project I possibly can... ;-)

Steve, I'm surprised you're not testing this yourself. I think your input would be valuable. But I know there's the relationship with Solid Angle.

For being an Alpha product, with a long roadmap yet ahead, I'm downright impressed with the variety of projects I'm able to render with Redshift already. And the beauty of it is it's seamless integration with Softimage. From my experience, it scales quite nicely. That said, I've never done anything like those crazy Whiskey Tree shots with trillions of polygons, and although RS suits our purposes at the commercial/broadcast/cinematic level, I'm simply not in a position to comment on it in terms of big money shots like the wide vistas of Elysium. I've just not had to render anything of that magnitude yet, so I can't say for sure. That's why I wish someone from studios like Whiskey Tree could join the alpha. Users in your position would have some valuable insight into Redshift's use at the heavier end of the scale.

Redshift is not even in beta yet. Considering how young it is, it's remarkably mature. Nic, Panos, and Rob have something to truly be proud of. I can't wait to see where it goes, and we continue to use it on any production we can (so far my last 5-6 jobs have all been in RS).

[adrencg]

I just finished a medical animation job with Redshift (2 minutes) and it was the rendering portion was the easiest time I've ever had -- in terms of scene setup and especially render times. At 720p, the average time per frame was 8 minutes. That average is kind of skewed because there was one trouble scene that was 30 minutes per frame, but most of the shots were around 3 minutes per frame. That scene now renders pretty well because they released a fix that solved some issues. They're great about listening to the users.

[McNistor]

Any support for OpenCL coming in the future?
Radeon cards are cheaper and stronger than nvidia's which I ditched a while ago.

[BenR]

Any support for OpenCL coming in the future?
Radeon cards are cheaper and stronger than nvidia's which I ditched a while ago.

Well here's the "coming soon" page: https://www.redshift3d.com/products/coming-soon
No idea about timeline.

[benoit81]

interview of Redshift, Nicolas Burtnyk (CEO) :
http://www.3d-test.com/contenu.php?id=2747

[mkr]

So open beta coming soon... nice.

[owei]

..and you may already be able to apply to the beta here:
https://www.redshift3d.com/get-redshift

cheers,
oli

[BenR]

interview of Redshift, Nicolas Burtnyk (CEO) :
http://www.3d-test.com/contenu.php?id=2747

Thanks for the link!
Interesting interview. One message though is that OpenCL is on the "long-term roadmap" and they haven't done much work on it yet. Perhaps it should not be on Redshift's "coming soon" page.

As others have said, I have really enjoyed testing Redshift and am really impressed by the work they are doing on integration.