Hey guys, Good requests. I’ll make sure they are logged. As long as the card supports OpenCL 1.2 you should be fine for use. I can’t speak for other manufacturers other than AMD on their OpenCL support though
On another note I put together an essay talking about the neverending question “Which renderer is faster” and how to answer that.
The short overview is here’s my proposal for how to compare “speed” of path tracers:
Match renders in both as close as possible
Render in both with some absurdly large # of samples to get “ground truth” images (no noise)
Render at more reasonable samples in both, record the render times and noise levels (script included for measure noise variance)
Compare render times and noise variance.
Same render times, but less noise = Faster renderer
Same noise variance but faster render = faster renderer
Thoughts? I probably will put together a video explaining this as well.
Pretty cool essay, this convinced me to check on Pro Render even when all my GPU’s are Nvidia.
Now regarding Pro Render… does it support things like hair and volumetrics?
One of the reasons why we don´t go with Corona in Blender is precisely because Corona does not support volumes, and that is important to us for different reasons.
@bsavery:
I’ve tried installing RPR repeatedly but still get the same problem (hardware failed [card has only opencl 1.1]), software and the last check passed. It says it will only run in cpu mode (I’ll accept that for trying out the renderer and it’s integration). But next is disabled, so I cannot continue the installation. I have not found a way through this. I filed a support case a month ago and quite quickly got a nice reply that they’d look into it and get back to me, but I have not heard anything since. Your review of less noise/time compared to cycles makes it very interesting to look up RPR (though noticing that denoising is not mentioned on the rpr features page which has had great results in at least nc renderman and cycles to improve noise/time). I’m in the process of buying a new workstation, and my expected renderer the closest years might influence hardware priorities. Are there any force switches to add to install commandline (did not find anything in the manual)?
Hey guys, we have an updated release coming next week as I mentioned. Anyone interested in giving some early feedback and bug bash send me a PM and I’ll link the build.
Yes, the videocard is from early 2011 I think… It was good at the time.