Yes, I can understand that, it’s just that I get annoyed when people post their opinion based on inaccurate information and misconception. If left uncorrected, somebody else might pick it up and soon enough it becomes “common wisdom”.
The computer I have is designed not to run one 3D CG program, it’s also designed to work with other as well like Maya, 3D Studio, and others. The graphic card was brought because Maya is pretty intensive on the processors. So I got the graphic card to reduce the strain on the CPUs.
That doesn’t really work. In the vast majority of cases, you cannot just offload work from the CPU to the GPU.
I am not expecting the GPU to run the operating system. Just take over the rendering. That way it can free up the CPUs. After all, wasn’t the GPUs supposed to handle rendering?
GPUs accelerate the viewport, but the final rendering is usually performed on the CPU, because that’s much more flexible. Only since GPUs have been become programmable has there been a shift towards using them for production rendering as well, but it’s pretty early in and there’s still many limitations (lack of memory, difficult programming environment, crappy drivers/compilers).
Overheating is only isolated to Blender itself. I’ve ran a 3D game called Borderlands 2. No shutdown, no overheating. I’ve also had Maya and made about 200 to 300 MB scene on the computer and ran it. The computer never shut down. I’ve rendered an image on it, but it never overheated.
I don’t know the characteristics of what you did there, but games in general tend to not use 100% of the CPU.
There are actually two solutions to overheating problem. One is to get a bigger fan, and another is to force Blender to use only one core, I had four cores and Blender was pushing all of them up to 100% of their capability and all four of them got very hot, very fast. So I forced Blender to use one thread (one core obviously), the render time took longer but the computer didn’t shut down.
I guess you can try using only 3 cores? That will leave your system more responsive and maybe it doesn’t overheat. You can also try “underclocking” your CPU.
Good to hear that Blender is in good hands. Why don’t Octane, Vray-RT, and iray support AMD GPUs? Why just NVIDIA?
NVIDIA provides a more mature GPU programming solution called CUDA, as well as a more reliable OpenCL compiler.
To bls, I understand and respect your opinion. I am more accustomed to ATI/AMD brand. I’ve used Maya and I didn’t notice any serious problems with AMD FirePro. It renders fine without any problems.
Whatever you do on Maya, you’re probably not rendering with the GPU. Neither mental ray nor the maya internal renderer use it.
I thought even if AMD brought ATI, they would still use ATI’s technologies on the Radeon graphic cards. Unless they changed Radeon? Ah, so AMD basically have a different OpenGL software that Blender doesn’t recognize, did I get that correct?
They’re using what used to be ATI technology. OpenGL works just fine with AMD, but the OpenCL compiler will fail to run Cycles, which is why it is hidden from you. (To avoid people complaining about it failing).
I’ve never seen my computer shut down after only about 10 to 15 minutes top of rendering a movie in Blender 3D. It never happened before. This was the first I’ve seen it do that. All other programs runs fine. You are right, the CPUs won’t get damaged, I have a question, what would happen if I repeatedly did it over and over again and again? Will the CPUs start to wear out faster? The computer shut down no less than 12 times, all within less than 20 minutes. I then restarted the computer and tried it again. Computer shut down again, and it gets quite annoying after a couple of tries.
Most programs won’t use the all of the CPU 100% of the time. Try rendering a movie in Mental Ray and see if that works out better.
EDIT: I’ve just looked at NVIDIA vs AMD. It’s basically saying that Blender is far behind MAX. I think I will cry.
I don’t know what that means. It shouldn’t come as a suprise that a commercially developed, 3500$ software is (in some regards) ahead of a piece of software developed mainly by volunteers.
EDIT:
I haven’t considered that. That indeed might be the case.