My render-rig was a mining-rig, 6x saphire cards.
I’m not sure why but when in the viewport none of the GPU-fans get turned on.
Which makes me wonder does it actually make use of them or not ?.
Overall i dont get the good looking results (and speed) as seen in blender.dev videos, from old projects.
So i’m guessing my graphic cards are not used, (although in settings they are enabled)
It could also be that Eevee is so light weight that it doesnt warmup the cards.
Though these projects took about a minute to render on my renderbeast.
I’m well aware that eevee is still Beta, i’m just beta testing and am learning my way around in 2.8
You probably mean sapphire ? =>
Sapphire only handles AMD GPU’s as far as Im aware. =>
As other blender users report, there currently seem to be problems with AMD cards in EEVEE!
Pls check the model names of your graphic cards. RX480 / R9 290 / etc.
Also im not sure if the GPUs fan being off is a good sign generally.
Where does your monitor cable go?
ha spot on, its indeed AMD took me a while to find it seam to be six AMD redon RX470 cards.
The screen itself is connected to a internal Intel card HD graphics 630 (its not that special).
The fans do start whenever i use cycles though. (and for me cycles is more the real thing than eeveee but out of curioisty i would like to see eevee in action on the AMD cards.
Ah, cool! On level1techs forum back when the Sapphire mining specific cards were announced we were speculating if those cards would be able to be used for anything else.
I seriously doubt that those gpu’s can be used for EEVEE. They might(/hopefully should) work for Cycles though.
Eevee as well as pretty much anything you see in Blender depends on OpenGL which in turn depends on the GPU driver which in turn depends on GPU itself. One can use a software render to replace OpenGL but the slow down are so severe ( at least 10 times slower for the most simple tasks even when compared with early old versions of OpenGL) that are used by coder only as reference.
So there is not much of a choice here, either use GPU or hello and welcome to snail mode. Even for something as simple as opening a menu.
I am not aware if Eevee takes advantage of CUDA itself , which is what Cycles depends on for its speed. In any case, the low performance may be attributed to the fact that Blender may see only one GPU or could be a ton of other reasons as well. But yeah its too early for the party.
well none of the 12 fans moved, so i think they where not used.
Kinda curious though tomorow latest drivers should be in place. (was 2 minor versions behind).
@Felix_Kutt they work great with cycles, in one larger presentation i got low on memory but then removed duplicates and replaced them by instances (redusing gpu mem) and all rendered fine.
If you like to know i could do a BMW speed test tomorrow
You must use a GPU profiler to draw such conclusion. If you are using Windows the Task Manager has a section that report how much of the GPU power is used and by which application. Make sure it render something in Blender because Blender uses so little GPU power that it reports it as zero.
That does not mean there is anything wrong with the code or that it does not rely on GPU mostly, just that the code is highly optimized to run very fast.
For example with Eevee enabled, if Blender is idle with the standard single box scene it report 0% GPU consumption, all I have to do is zoom in and out very fast and goes up to 40%. That’s a scene that has practically almost nothing in it.
Cycles BMW GPU benschmark 00:55:27 in second render attempt
( loading of shaders over 6 cards was 1:47:13, the first startup render always has extra time in loading). it cannot compete in time with renderstreet (as they have lots of servers but i render a faster), so if time is not that important its cheaper to render here. Last 6 min animation film at render 50fps 1080p took ten days or so. (the reason i wrote an app that monitors blender against fails)
50fps allows for better video post processing (smoothly increase / decrease speed => sony vegas).
What I have understood is that Eevee is more like gaming tech. To use multiple gpus in gaming, you need the sli/crossfire -connections and the app needs to support it. i haven’t hear anything about Eevee doing that.
In user preferences user can enable Cycles compute units as gpu and cpu. This has nothing to do with Eevee or eg. Blender Internal.
@Felix_Kutt its the one from this page https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/
(the zip contains GPU and CPU version), in GPU it became 12 tiles, which is 2 times my 6 cards.
Cards are not overclocked (i think), and i wonder if that’s possible, but i’m not that deep into hardware.
When i got the system it had 7 or 8 cards (not sure) but that didnt make it much faster for cycles,
As there where plans to create a renderfarm it was more cost effective to have 6 cards.
(if a card isnt workign it costs). but the plans for a renderfarm are in the freezer for now.
I had came in contact with a large miner and in the end i got a rig at work (i’m not a miner, i’m a blenderer).
But he was curious of what eventually to do with aged GPU farms.
(a farm contains a large number of rigs ).
i dont think it matters sli/crossfire those cards dont have a graphics out. (vga / hdmi /… )
Essentially Their just OPenCL machines (not even Cuda? acoording to GPUZ)
Last I checked, Eevee only uses a single GPU for rendering. And like the current OpenGL renderer for boomsmashes, I’m pretty sure that it requires that you have an active display context.
However, for those of us who want to do batch rendering (think render farms) on machines with multiple GPUs, the Blender devs are very much aware of the value of taking advantage of those other devices… particularly for headless rendering.
So multiple GPU support should be coming. It’s just not there yet.
