AMD Pro Duo slow in Cycles?

Radeon Pro Duo slow in Cycles?

I recently purchased a Radeon Pro Duo after watching a video by CG Geek called ‘The best GPU for Blender?’, which I am not allowed to link to, since I am new to this forum.

The thing is, my rendertimes with it are far higher than CG Geek’s, and rendertimes are often unstable.

Example with the BMW benchmark:
CG Geek (at 5:05 in the video): 101 seconds
My first render: 227 seconds
Second render (just after, without changing any setttings): 180 seconds
My GTX 1070 in the same build: 187 seconds

When I used the AMD card with the newest driver (Radeon Pro Software Adrenaline Edition 17.12.2), I kept getting this error message when I tried to render:

AMD GPU "OpenCL error (-4) CL_MEM_OBJECT_ALLOCATION_FAILURE

I then downloaded one of the older drivers (17.Q2.1), and got rid of that problem.
But the card is still way slower than expected.

Another thing I noticed is, that the AMD card is really slow, when rendering a completely unlit scene.
Whereas the GTX 1070 just plow through, rendering it in a few seconds, the AMD card uses several minutes rendering the black tiles, which is just ridiculous.

I am, of course, using the latest version of blender, where support for the AMD cards are said to be ‘on par’ with the CUDA-based ones.

My specs are:
Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00 GHz
AMD Radeon Pro Duo (polaris)
MSI Geforce GTX 1070 OC edition, 8GB GDDR 5, 256-bit
16GB RAM

Hi,

I just purchased one as well. I have not tested the benchmark yet. I saw the same video as you. Mine has been running very smooth. No errors. When I have some time, I will test mine as well and post the times.

Aaron

Looking forward to hearing about your result.
I suspect that the error code I got, was because of my ram. I had to render in to separate windows, as I was using both the GTX 1070 and the Pro Duo, and my 16GB couldn’t handle it. The GTX 1070 started giving me the same error code, when the scene was big enough.
But there is still the problem with the overall speed, and I would really like to hear if you also experience considerable ‘lag’ with the Pro Duo, when rendering a completely black scene with only a few objects.

I am looking forward to hearing your result. Do you know if this could be a RAM issue? I only have 16GB, running on 1600MHz

One thing I noticed, and I will try to explain the best I can. You know when you delete an object in edit mode then you go back into object mode and there is still a little dot that represents the object you deleted in edit mode? I have noticed that on some occasions, if I do not delete that dot left behind from the deleted object, the Vram for the rendering goes way up and maxes out the 16GB on the Pro Duo and the GPU will stall for a bit until I can cancel the rendering. I know this sounds strange that is because it is strange. I had never seen this until I got the Pro Duo. So make sure you do not have a thing like that going on. When my scene renders normally it is only using about 7GB. So I knew something was wrong. And that is what I found out what was happening. Other than that, is works great. My guess is the GPU does not know what to with that missing object and just goes haywire.

Thanks for your reply!
This is not my problem, unfortunately. I always delete the entire object.

Starting from somethign similar. I have 4 RX 480s (right now running 2 as my server met its maker) With standards 2.79 blender, no matter what i tried it only rendered with Single GPU. I created ticket and there was a bug in the AMD driver of incorrectly numerating the GPU’s so blender only seen one even when multiple are selected.

The nightly build did include the build and rendering went right back to where it should rendering 2 tiles at once.

Try running Luxmark and compare to others. If that matches other similar cards, then try latest nightly blender build and see if things improved

worst case - reinstall the OS… some old parts of driver are holding back the performance… but i doubt it…

I’m going to try the nighly version, then. I’ve just been running the ‘standard’ version.
I’m also gonna put the Pro Duo in a new build with better RAM (DDR4), where it’s gonna be the only GPU, and see if this makes any difference.
Will post the results here.

I just got a Pro Duo as well following CG Geeks video and I’m pretty shocked as well, as it takes 11ish minutes to render a frame my 1060 can do in just 3 - 4 mins…

I would be grateful for any advice. as I have an impending deadline :frowning:

First I’m surprised by this level of discrepancy in render speed.

Q: When rendering via GPU alone, do you see 1 tile or 2?
Q: What blender version are you using
Q: What tile settings are you using?

In latest Adrenalin AMD drivers they changed how they enumerate the GPU’s as such only in the nightly Blender builds there was a workaround implemented. (love how quickly the devs fixed this after I reported it… One of the many reasons I prefer Blender Over other packages)

Also the numbers you provided 11m (R Pro DUo) vs 3-4m 1060. Is that using a standard scene or your particular project?

I tested my PRO DUO with the BMW GPU Scene…I did not change any settings in the file.

I used both cards in the DUO…So rendered with two tiles. I am using 2.79 official build.

Mine rendered the scene in 165 seconds

Rendering the CPU file with 40 threads, the scene rendered in 170 seconds.

If I remember correctly, in the video, I believe he, CG Geek, mentioned that he overclocked the card slightly.

to answer your questions
I was seeing 2 tiles
2.79 official
i have an add-on that does the ‘best setting’ automatically i believe andrew price recommended it.

i have since tried the nightly builds and on the 13th Feb there was a driver update and it is performing better than the 1060, but not by much…

That was rendering a slide from a project i was working on. i also found it suddenly stops ramdomly on some slides. one particular night i left it rendering over night to walk in the next morning and find it had stopped around 50 mins after i left it and re started about 15 mins before i walked in the office. This has only started happening since the driver update.

I know this is an older thread, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of discussion on the Radeon Pro Duo 32gb, so I wanted to chime in my experience/ frustration.

Upgraded from a 970gtx on my older computer that had a i7 4790k and 32 gb ram. Saw an improvement immediately, maybe not as much as I would have liked, but a definite improvement in render times on personal renders and benchmark files.

I’ve recently upgraded to a Threadripper 1950x, 64 gb ram and am very happy with it, I paired the Pro Duo with it and am disappointed in performance. On all benchmark files, the Pro Duo beats CPU rendering. Unfortunately, on my un-optimized scenes (Im still learning), that tend to have heavy volumetrics, The cpu will be almost twice as fast. I don’t have a clue why and would love any insight, sadly I’m not experienced enough to make my scenes easier on the Pro Duo so I could benefit more from it.