E-Cycles - The fastest render engine for Blender. 3.2 release available now!

Hmm interesting and still lack of information about it.

Well since 8K textures are becoming the Norm, I can see a real need for thisā€¦

Hi, OoC is in 2.81 but not merged in master if I it understand correctly.

https://developer.blender.org/D6068

Seams not a problem to add patch to E-Cycles Optix for next build.

Cheers, mib
EDIT: It will be in master when next merge is done.

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Mathieu, Iā€™ve got a couple things I have been thinking about today, that personally I would love to see in E-C if at all possibleā€¦

[1] Some kind of indication of the what the current Quick Settings is set at ā€“ like to the left of Integrator [Path Tracing] maybe you could have a (static) text field that is populated with last chosen Quick Setting, and ideally it would have *Modified or something next to it if any values of that Quick Setting have been changed.

[2] It would truly rock if you could somehow make a duplicate of View Layer > Override and put that right inside the Quick Settings menu. This is one thing Iā€™m finding Iā€™m missing about Octane, because itā€™s a snap to turn on Clay Rendering or Override and do super-fast renders. Depending on the project, I do a lot of clay/ao-style rendered rough animations (that render around 2sec/frame) as proxies for client first-looks, NLE rough cuts, and whatnot, and it would really be convenient, logical and efficient (imho) to have a means to toggle override quickly right in E-C Quick Settings menu. Right guys?.. I canā€™t be alone hereā€¦

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Agreed, would be very helpful:grinning :grinning::+1:

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To @all about Out Of Core: Itā€™s indeed already available for CUDA since a year, for OpenCL since 4 years and for OptiX since yesterday. While it works, there is a reason NVidia puts expensive GDDR6 or so on itā€™s GPU. Some laptops / oem cards have standard DDR on the GPU and you feel it hard on the performance compared to the same GPU with fast GDDR, even if your system has fast DDR4 3000+.

Add on top that to access system memory, the GPU has an extra cost and added latency with PCI-Express, etc. and you get performance that will vary a lot, depending on what is stored where and how often it is accessed. Ideally, hardware vendors could use the GPU memory as a smart cache and have memory completly abstracted, letting the memory controller or driver decide what needs low latency and what can be stored on system memory or even pagefile, but itā€™s not there yet as far as I know.

So while it will work and is ok when the space required go some percent over your dedicated memory, it will always be slower. Sometime much slower and there isnā€™t much that can be done about it. At least as long as we use more than one bounce, as more than one bounce implies random access = anything can be accessed = no idea what should be better stored ā€œnearerā€.

Disclaimer: had a party yesterday, Iā€™m happy if @skw who did the original patch can correct me here :slight_smile:

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Hi Norka,

thanks for the propositions.

  • for 1) Iā€™ll have a look asap,
  • for 2) is that just material override or also samples (this last one may be disturbing)? While itā€™s possible, you can have several view layers in one scene. Should I show the material override for the active one only or all of them?
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Yes!!!.. thatā€™s kickass news Mathieu! I havenā€™t used View Layers much yet in Blender if you can believe that. I used layers a ton in Octane, but since Iā€™ve been working on a huge project of industrial animations that do not require hardly any compositing (since starting E-C like six months ago), we should probably let others chime in as to exactly how we should handle this. My guess is that if you can do both all and active, then by all means do it. Hopefully it could all be pretty compact and take up very little real-estate in the UI. We donā€™t want the E-C Quick Settings UI being any more cluttered than it needs to beā€¦ For me at least, just having a dupe of Overrideā€™s pull-down menu of mats would be perfect.

Edit: As for samples, let me look into this for a bit. Iā€™ll be right backā€¦

Edit Part Deux: Okay, I personally think that turning on Override in E-C should automatically change the Samples value in View Layer > Override to zero, then it will be using the scene samplesā€¦ That makes sense, right?

If you do indeed put a dupe of Override in Quick Settings, will it be reflected in the View Layer Properties > Material Override section if we turn it on in E-C? Hopefully the answer is yes.

And folks, please do chime in and letā€™s get this right on the first try. What are your thoughts?

Thanks so much BB!

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Yes I agree, indication of which quick setting is used or if itā€™s modified would be great.

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Yep, I think a bit of brainstorming and UI design would be good to make it fit well. Maybe a right-click select thread would help? When enough agree on a proposal, I implement it.

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New builds of E-Cycles are up for all platforms.

Changelog:

  • OptiX devices can now use system memory (like Out Of Core rendering, benchmark results are welcome). Thanks to Patrick Mours for porting Stefan Wernerā€™s patch.
  • noise/scrambling distance parameter is working again and is now working as expected in viewport too.
  • includes all the latest fixes as of today of the 2.81 stable branch.

A very nice nature render made in 10 seconds with E-Cycles RTX and the latest ā€œthe Groveā€ addon:
https://twitter.com/johannes_wilde/status/1184756176422088704

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Brent, do you possibly have any free time that you could spearhead this effort?.. maybe put together a sample animation render with override (white or gray - no textures except low-res hdr) to show folks who havenā€™t used Override what it is, and explain why they should care, why itā€™s a powerful tool, how fast they render, etc? Iā€™m currently working like 13-14 hr days and if you want this as bad as me, maybe you are the guy to help make sure it happens? Please advise.Thanks B!

And Mathieu, is OoC coming to non-rtx E-C?

Good morning

What NVidia driver version is need for the Linux RTX version?

The documentation mentions 436.x and upā€¦but for Windowsā€¦
Nvidia itself lists 430.50 as the last driver version for Linuxā€¦

thanks in advance
richard

Check this one:

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This is oddā€¦when going through the nvidia website and choose gpu, os it lists you only 430.50 versionā€¦
only when googling you get the 435.21 linkā€¦

Maybe I wait with the Linux driver update so it wonā€™t mess up my tensorflow/keras setup until Iā€™ve finished TF work (o;

But give a try on windowsā€¦

thanks for the pointer
richard

Normally, you can already render using system memory on GPU with CUDA, so on standard E-Cycles. Itā€™s a feature added in Blender, so if you find a file where it doesnā€™t work, you can make a bug report on developer.blender.org. I recommend to only use it when itā€™s a matter of few hundreds of MBs. But benchmark results are welcome.

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Hi Richard, and @blndrusr 435 drivers were beta version. So I still recommend 436+.

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New builds are up for Windows (v20191021) to fix a problem on some machine with OptiX and denoising.

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Hmmā€¦how do I see if it is using the RT cores?

With 436.48 driver on Windows, 128x128 tiles and feature set = experimental I get:

E_Cycles_20191021_Optix: 136 seconds
E_Cycles_20191021_RTX: 140 seconds

CUDA and Optix are enabled in preferencesā€¦

cheers
richard

Ah stupid me (o;

I guess I need to select ā€œOptixā€ tab to activate RTX supportā€¦right? (o;

Much fasterā€¦wellā€¦canā€™t compare to 20191021 Optix version as it wonā€™t render thenā€¦

BTW: What happened with the ā€œopen recent filesā€¦ā€ on the splash screen?

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