How to render animation faster in Cycles and use GPU

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

My problem is that I have an animation that is about 4,000 frames, 54,000 faces and all materials are basic diffuse shaders but one frame takes about 10 minutes+ to render and there is still some noise. I am using CPU to render because when I use GPU I get the error " CUDA device supported only compute capability 1.3 or up, found 1.1." I have an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ and it says that it supports CUDA but for some reason it doesn’t work. I have tried to find ways to make it work such as updating drivers and other things I found on forums but none of it has worked or I couldn’t do it correctly. I’m sure if I could use my GPU to render it would help greatly. Does anyone know how to make it work? If not how do I make it render faster and less noisy using my CPU. If I can’t find a way I will need to render it with the BI but I like the quality of Cycles a lot better. So if anyone could help me get my GPU rendering to work and/or help me make the renders faster and not so noisy using CPU I would really really appreciate it because I’ve been at this for a couple weeks now :stuck_out_tongue: Thanks a lot!

2

first up, there is a thing called enter… it helps other people be able to read your post

next, your best bet on getting your card to work is to use a graphicall build, its a card which isnt fully supported, so some features of cycles may not work… but still give it a shot – http://graphicall.org/444

in terms of making it render faster… turn down the number of min/max bounces to 2 or 3… and limit the amount of transparencies aswell

3

Thanks for the answer. I went to the link for graphicall and the problem is that I click on download and it downloads a .blend file. Do I have to put that file somewhere? because when I try to run GPU on it it still doesn’t work. This is the problem I always have when I download from there. Idk if I’m suppose to take something from that .blend or what. It’s probably simple and stupid but for some reason I’m having trouble with it lol. Thanks :slight_smile:

4

again, press enter when you type stuff out

what you downloaded from graphicall is a 7zip file, its like a zip / rar file format, use winrar to extract it… inside should be a blender folder, which contains a build of blender that you can run from anywhere.

5

Thanks a lot! it worked! And I pressed enter when I typed this out but idk what it does. Again thanks a lot for the help I really appreciate it!

6

I also have the 9800GTX+, which works partially with a graphics all build (all cuda version). The problem is that the experimental render (the one you have to choose if you use the 1.1 cuda) doesn’t render all my textures or lights correctly. So I’m back to CPU rendering.

7

Seems like cycles is an issue for me too…

On my Nvidia quadro (1700 at 2.2gb virtual ram) the trunk build of blender actually takes much longer!
With a cpu render (core 2 quad, Q9300 2.5ghz) my scene takes 23mins a frame, on gpu it reached the half way mark at this time.

B.T.W Cycles cannot be compaired to luxrender as lux is an external application providing MUCH higher quality and more accurate results, quicker.

Looks like I will be using yafray & BI for my average renders for now, any guesses as to why cycles is so slow?

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Looks like I will be using yafray & BI for my average renders for now, any guesses as to why cycles is so slow?

Quadro is not ideal card for cycles. Why it takes so long ? It’s your scene and settings, but only you know what is in your scene and what materials/render settings you are using so don’t know how anyone can give you specific advice without actually seeing your blend file.

For general advice, search these forums as others have asked many times before you.

9

cycles can’t support cards like quadro? That’s a problem.

My scene is a reasonibly high poly robot with some glossy (plastic like) materials and one large mesh light to cover the scene; I may try scaling this down and adding a rim & kicker instead as I heard from the mango blogs that cycles has trouble with large scenes and lights.

Seems like it’s not quite ready to compete with the likes of mental ray just yet; close though.

10

Hi freakygeez, the FX 1700 is a good card but stone old (2007/8) for modern GPU rendering.
Blender/Cycles support cards with Compute Capability > 1.3 and FX 1700 has 1.1.
I have a GTX 550Ti and this card is old next year because in august 2012 the new GTX 650/60 is out.
Also “Gaming” cards are much faster as Quadro cards, more cuda cores, more clock speed.
A GTX 580 beats a Quadro 6000 easily.
Try to find a build that supports older cards on graphicall.org.

Cheers, mib.