as I’ll be purchasing a 7950 3GB I might as well venture into using LUX render as a open CL based rendering application. my question is:
will the 7950 3GB perform better in LUX render when rendering animations or will it show no faster and better performance comparing it to a stand alone 6950 2GB?
or should I just get a 6950 2gb make it the master and buy 2 more low end PC with ati gpu and make a small render farm? which option would be the better choice?
I figured that it might be better to just get a fast 7950 3GB and skip building a small render farm alltogether…
GPU support in Luxrender is fairly limited, it’s only an improvement with highly complex meshes, and you often run out of RAM in that case. Cycles in my opinion is not worth anything as far as realism goes (no absorbtion, volumetric effects, dispersion, realistic light sources). Even at that, Cycles doesn’t have very good openCL support, and probably wont for a while yet. Octane is the best GPU renderer, but only supports CUDA, so I’d hold off on that 7950
thanks man! first real answer!
I’ve looked up on octane and it sells for only 99 euro… direct conversion put’s it around 128 dollars. even though I would consider that affordable… I would still prefer using Lux render because of it’s open source nature…
what is the best route for me to go right now?
6950 2GB for use with blender and LuxRender? so later I could set up a small render farm with two or more low end computers?
running out of ram? is 16GB worth of RAM enough? and I would think that 2GB Vram is suffice for high quality textures.
You seem to have no idea what the difference between the renderers is and judge them based on their license model and all in all you sound very inexperienced.
I’d start to gather informations and experience by using the renderers instead of planning to spend a lot of money on hardware. Once you know where you’ll hit limits or what renderer meets your requirements best you can start to invest in better hardware.
There are plenty of threads in this forum already answering most of your questions and I really see no reason why you have to use “Latest News” for your technical inquiries because you think you don’t get the attention you deserve.
true. I’m not a pro and are very inexperienced when it comes to all things blender and hardware related. because of my limited budget I’m trying to gather information as hard as I can before purchasing hardware that I would regret later on… testing by using is a good learning process… I’m just too eager and would like to avoid future complications.
granted I haven’t used the search function properly… I will utilize it better next time and avoid asking unnecessary question. my question is simple really… a small render farm that consist of 1 master and 2 low end computers or a single fast 7950 card. which setup performs better in lux render? no, don’t need to answer that. I’ll figure this out on my own.
Yeh, I am strightforward as usual, there’s no use to tiptoe around, I don’t mean it mean in any way, I just don’t want someone who has no idea what he’s doing waste money for something he might not need.
Generally, in Luxrender you’re better of with a renderfarm, although 2 or 3 machines are now farm. There’s no definition of farm, but with 3 machines you save some time, you don’t farm frames with that.
It’s quite easy, the GPU acceleration wich is not that impressive in Luxrender (which might change once Luxray is fully integrated) ONLY works for crude Pathtracing. Photonmapping, Direct Lighting and the MLT Pathtracing (which is highly desireable for complex lighting solutions) do not support it. It’s brute CPU+RAM power there.
That said, don’t worry about it yet.
Learn Blender, Learn Renderers.
See what you want to do. If you’re going to do game assets you don’t need all of this anyways. If you’re going to render animations you’ll need another renderer as if you’re going to do product visualisations, and if you’re going to do archviz it depends if you want to use a biased or unbiased method and if you’re going to do exteriors or interiors, more night or daysettings, or both.
And once you figured out what you want to do and how you can try to locate bottlenecks and shortcomings and fix them with better hardware.
Else you’re the dude at the bottom of a skislope with a 10000$ racing equipment who falls over 10 times on his way to the chairlift and on his way down only uses snowplough turns.
And like you said, that your budget is limited - don’t waste it on stuff you don’t need yet.
I agree with arexma on this, learn the basics first before you start going crazy- cycles is really nice already, and by the time you get skills to start making serious work cycles will be that much better as well. I don’t want to spend your money, but atm nvidia is what I would get for a gfx card because cuda is more mature/utilized by other renderers.
make sense.(that’s your super power right?) no, don’t worry about it. I myself am a straight forward kind of person too.
truth is I’ve been using blender 2.49b on my laptop for quite some time now and are frustrated by it’s limitations…(i stopped blendering for quite some time…) seeing all the good works produced here by forumers on blender artist I can’t help but feeling eager to learn more. I’ve been learning through reading and blendering on my laptop. I am now quite knowledgeable with my laptop limitations.
but as you said, there is so much more to learn. thanks. thank you for taking the time to help. I appreciate it.
That’s a funny thread in some ways, mostly because it started because of a conversation with somebody who wasn’t Brecht. Apparently the other guys were much more content when blender had a “ridicolous old” render engine, even though it’s been said many times that cycles will be animation oriented so other projects shouldn’t feel so threatened.
And if you read the thread you’ll find out that it’s not really about forking but about making a LuxStudio that works independent of Blender and other apps just like Maxwell, Thea or Octane.
Well and if they want to integrate Luxrender into Blender they got to wait until the work under the hood is done. If the API has to be changed in the work with cycles that’s how it is.
I for one don’t care if Lux is integrated or not. I’d actually welcome a LuxStudio. IMO Lux-material editing is painful within Blender and I never use it for animations, might as well make a LuxStudio with a good exporter and material editor.
