So, autotile does not work? I get way better times on the 20190516 build, but the colors on the render are wrong… Is there a way to manually calculate the optimal tile size? Or a way to make the autotile report the size and manually typing the values?
Autotiles work correctly as far as I know, it’s just that some changes in Blender made OIDN slower on multi-gpu setups and I had to adapt tile size. If you find a scene were manual tile size is significantly faster than auto, you are welcome to send me a file to reproduce per mail (if you used gumroad) or on the support page of blender market.
The 20190516 version has the original lightning system of Cycles, so you need to reactivate nodes for your lights/world and then the color will be right.
Hi everyone,
it’s been a while that i’m planning to upgrade my hardware, the idea was to buy a notebook because of the need to have something that I can bring with me wherever I need. Beside of that, I would love to have the opportunity to upgrade it with an eGpu in the future to be able to take advantage of all the power I could have at “home” but at the same time be able to have a nice machine on the go. So my question is: What if I buy a notebook with a pretty decent internal GPU and then I’ll associate a sister of the same but External? For instance a Notebook with this specs:
RTX 2070 Max-Q 8G, i7-8750H, 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe SSD
associated with an
RTX 2070 eGPU
Will E-Cycles be able to use both of Graphic cards simultaneously?
I read a bunch of articles that discourage the use of eGpu due to the degradation and the slow down of the signal through the Thunderbolt 3 port, but everyone considered the “gaming side” of it.
Should I expect the same problem with E-Cycles?
Can someone help me? Is there someone that has experience with this kind of stuff?
Thank you all
What do you mean? The only thing that should happen is clipping of bright light sources. They don’t contain any absolute measurements, only relative. Maybe you can paint in the sundisk with correct absolute value, but at least with my own camera equipment I can’t get the sundisk to not blow out (iso100, 1/4000s, f/32 I think is my max, pluss 2.33 stops from extra filters).
If the included miniature HDRIs comes from HDRI haven, they are for sure not “correctly setup”. Trying out kiara_5_noon, it works automatically at exposure 0. But being direct sunlight, it should work directly at -6.64. If I set -6.64, I can go about 50 in background strength to compensate and now my interior lights (with absolute values) should be correct relative to the outdoor.
If the addon I’m using is correct, it means you should dial in -6.64 in your camera’s exposure (color management), then adjust the noon sun HDRIs power so that it matches what you’d expect - and now any indoor lighting assets you have (since they should be absolute) relatively matches the outdoor lighting.
Said another way, in real life, going from an outdoor shoot to an indoor one I would have to change my camera exposure to compensate for the lack of lighting. But with HDRI’s I don’t, I can leave it happily at 0. Except I would have to change all my lighting assets every time I change the HDRI. And that really really tickles my workflow OCD 
Hi,
E-Cycles work with all GPU recognised by the OS. I have at least one Mac user using external GPUs and it works for him. E-Cycles only need bandwidth when synchronizing the scene before render starts and at each tile update, so the limited bandwidth of Thunderbold if any shouldn’t matter much.
If you use denoising, I would recommend using E-Cycles 2.79 or the 2.80 from May for best performance, but that also apply to internal GPUs.
Kind regards
Hi Mathieu,
thank you so much for your response, Yes that’s what I thought as well.
I suppose that the bottleneck in the use of an eGpu for gaming is the slowdown during the transmission of the data back and forth between the pc and the external graphic card.
So do you think that if the OS will recognize the eGpu I will be able to use the external and the internal gpu in conjunction during the rendering as if they were in the same machine?
Or I will need to choose between one of the two?
Is it possible for Blender to split all the information between the two graphics cards?
I do not have any experience in engineering and in programming so please to forgive me for all my “nooby” question.
Thank you so much for all the information Mathieu,
please keep up the good work,
you are doing an amazing job with E-Cycles
Hi guido,
If the OS recognize both cards, then you will be able to use both. Of course, I’ve seen so many things in IT that nothing is 100% sure, but it’s as sure as it can be.
Kind regards,
Mathieu
^Reposting in case you didn’t see.^
Sorry, yes as far as I tested, it applies on baking too (tested one own file and classroom). Standard rendering is more tested, so there may be some corner cases that requires debugging. That’s the reason I offered 25% last week with the “bake” code. So far, the only report I got has already been fixed 
So it looks like it works good, you can ask @mag.py and @sasa42 for there experience with it and you can even get 50% off now. I’m also going to add more bake tools soon for free for all current users of course.
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Thanks, I’m going to purchase this week regardless, but it would be a huge bonus is baking were sped up too. 
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Hello good people. I just want to ask what adaptive sampling is or what it does. I tried to do my little research but I wasn’t answered fully.
“Adaptive Sampling is a rendering technique that disables sampling for pixels that have reached a specified noise threshold.”
From https://inlifethrill.com/adaptive-sampling-octane-render/
It work in the same way in many render engines like Luxcore or Arnold.
You set a noise threshold and the engine stop when the noise level is reached even you have set up a much higher sample rate.
For example: You set 1000 samples and one tile of an image reach the noise level at 100 samples the tile stop rendering further and goes to the next tile.
Cheers, mib
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I am now answered. Thank u so much
@bliblubli
Hi, as we spoke about AS, I cant get useful settings for BMW27 and adaptive sampling.
I set 512 samples and use default settings without denoiser, check different sampling patterns (Sobol, Dithered Sobol etc.) and fast preset.
E-Cycles RC2a on Linux.
Render time is 30% faster but also more noisy and blotchy result.
By the way, there are two Pattern settings, are they different?
The quality setting 3 does not work with this file, only black image.
Cheers, mib
I’ve been trying both builds and the may version renders faster for me, rendering on an ubuntu laptop with a single 1060. I checked the tile size and is as you say, tiles in RC1a are bigger, roughly 256, reducing them to 128 gives an insignificant better time, so auto is ok.
Yet, the big difference in render times are there, and the inconsistency betwen shaders is also, being the correct shading in the RC1a side.
See some screenshots:
May:
RC1a:
same scene, same settings:
may render time: 01:09:89 ai denoise (3): 00:09:00 total: 1:27:89
RC1a render time: 01.46.30 ai denoise (3):00:18:60 total: 02:04:90
So there’s a difference in denoise time, but also in render time…
I’ll keep using the RC version as it has some features that makes my life easier. Just got curious about the differences between the older version and the current one and dug a little.
Hope it helps 
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Hi, did you check RC2a ?
I skipped RC1 so cant compare atm…
Cheers, mib
Well a new build for Threadripper would be nice…especially with the new price aggressive models coming from the guy who Intel didn’t wanted and founded AMD (o;
Dunno how the percentage is spread between Windows/Linux/macOS users using E-Cycles…
But I would drop macOS anyway since it totally makes no sense to support it unless Apple decides to release new NVidia drivers…
So maybe this little poll helps to get a figure what is mostly used nowadays and in the near future…
I am using E-Cycles on:
- macOS
- Windows
- Linux Intel
- Linux AMD
0 voters
I updated my E-cycles images thread n.n
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Hey,
I’ve been having problems with blender shutting down when rendering a still with the latest rc builds. Could this have to do with hair in the scene? Any quick ideas what could be causing it?
If you have any pointers for me on how to be more specific describing the problem, that’d be great.
(System specs: I7 6700k / geforce 980 ti / 64 gigs of ram).
Thanks in advance!