Mental image - iray technology article.

[trombe]

I note this article appeared today:

http://www.tenlinks.com/news/PR/mental_images/100109_mentalray38.htm

Does anyone have any thoughts on the likelihood that a normal progression of the mr integration to Revit, will feaure this upgrade in the 2010 year release ?
(since the article notes mental ray 3.8 will have iray from november 2009 onwards)

With Chaos VRay and Fryrender getting into RT rendering along with others, is iray, the Nvidia / mental images answer to surging imrpovements ?

I assume then, you have to buy one of the new FX cards ! lol stink ! out with my old Quadro and with with a new one maybe....

trombe

[truevis]

Does anyone have any thoughts on the likelihood that a normal progression of the mr integration to Revit, will feature this upgrade in the 2010 year release ?...I wouldn't hold my breath.:Oops:

I suppose someday we'll model in a more life-like environment. There are a few issues to address before then.

"iray technology speeds the creative process by easily enabling designers to accurately simulate their creations using materials and lighting that relate directly to the physical world experienced every day. " I have never experienced a sun angle like the attached sample image...:cry: Well, maybe Anchorage, Alaska -- 2am in June.

[aaronrumple]

I assume then, you have to buy one of the new FX cards ! lol stink ! out with my old Quadro and with with a new one maybe....

trombe

What these systems are really geared toward is the Nvidia Tesla server. It is basically a $10,000 supercomputer. They just anounced a new chip - "Fermi" - that has 512 cores and is claimed to boost double floating point precision speed by 450%. If the actual products meet the hype - rendring is going to get really, really fast.

[trombe]

What these systems are really geared toward is the Nvidia Tesla server. It is basically a $10,000 supercomputer. They just anounced a new chip - "Fermi" - that has 512 cores and is claimed to boost double floating point precision speed by 450%. If the actual products meet the hype - rendring is going to get really, really fast.

Hey Aaron,
The article also says :

“The combination of iray and NVIDIA GPUs is an astounding achievement, demonstrating our undisputed leadership in computational graphics,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. “The ease-of-use and remarkable speed of iray brings interactive photorealism easily within the reach of any creator or consumer of 3D content.”

iray rendering technology significantly improves how designers, engineers and other content development professionals work with rendering tools to produce high-quality, photorealistic imagery. Harnessing the power of the GPU and the NVIDIA CUDA™ parallel processing architecture, iray technology progressively refines an image until maximum detail is reached, providing a single process that smoothly combines interactive pre-visualization and final frame rendering. iray technology requires only a small number of intuitive settings relating to the physical world that delivers a “push-button” rendering experience for creating final-frame photo-real images.

“It’s no secret that users want to utilize the power of GPUs for photorealistic rendering,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. “With iray, we deliver a solution that not only leverages the GPU in the most efficient manner but also raises the bar for what is defined as photorealism in rendering. (abridged)



I thought from reading the article, that the iray enabled cards, of most medium and top end cards, have some CUDA technology already built in with the gpu set up/s. While they are not optimised for maximum output in a Tesla -CUDA cluster set up, advances from these projects have already filtered into the current crop of medium and top end NVidia iray enabled cards ? (they also have a deal to upgrade for people with a certain new geration of cards and for instance, the current crop of FX1800 upwards, are such products they talk about).

It seems that the tone of this article indicates a strong focus towards consumerism,
And it notes creators and consumers of 3D content, in a simple and direct way, rather than particle physicists (for the typical science focussed applicaitons like Tesl-CUDA clusters) so yeah, I read this as now having moved beyond the realms of science, research and actuary stuff exclusively, and into the realms of mainstream AEC, CNC and viz etc. markets.
And after all, NVidia would pursue this with great relish I would think...they have a great product that keeps leading the way !


truevis: yes agree about the low sun angle..! lmao, maybe I will ask them about that one !
cheers
trombe

[aaronrumple]

I thought from reading the article, that the iray enabled cards, of most medium and top end cards, have some CUDA technology already built in with the gpu set up/s. While they are not optimised for maximum output in a Tesla -CUDA cluster set up, advances from these projects have already filtered into the current crop of medium and top end NVidia iray enabled cards ?

Yes, I read it and downloaded the white paper form their web site.
It will work with any CUDA compatible card and even runs under CPU - but slower.

I don't think it is any coincidence that this anouncement was done with the Nvidia Fermi release. It seems that this is the chip that iray was really designed for... It should be way fast.

Personally - I'm looking at our rendering farm and where we go from here. It seems that a Tesla system may be the ticket now that it will support both iray and vray. I'm very anxious to see how fast these systems really are once in the real world. We keep a dozen computers pretty busy full time with just processing images. If I could stick in one tesla system and cut our rendering time by 10. That would be sweet and worth every penny.

Have to sell by home laptop since it has an ATI card....

[trombe]

...................
Personally - I'm looking at our rendering farm and where we go from here. It seems that a Tesla system may be the ticket now that it will support both iray and vray. I'm very anxious to see how fast these systems really are once in the real world. We keep a dozen computers pretty busy full time with just processing images. If I could stick in one tesla system and cut our rendering time by 10. That would be sweet and worth every penny.

Have to sell by home laptop since it has an ATI card....

Hah haaaa.. yeah, ATI FireGel cards are 3rd mortgage prices here and we learned the hard way, that they are just not required in Revit to get the job done. You seem to be right on Aaron.
I wonder how to deal with this myself now though.

It looks to me, as though the logical move is to ditch my current Quadro card in favour of an FX1800 (at least) so as to leverage gpu processing instead of cpu however, not being a techie, there has to be an easy switch method where punter can tell the video system to process with gpu and not cpu otherwise you may not be gaining anything ?

Right now, I am trying to figure out if the gpu method is the bomb over a 4 core restricted Revit to mr flow using either quad cpu or a Core 2 Duo still, even though the new card will obviously be optimised for multi core clusters even when they are not Tesla clusters.
I am hoping this represents a decent potential speed increase for us mere mortals to access immediately ?

NVidia have always seemed cool enough not to restrict the product technology / use and I doubt this new development would change that ?....I mean not everyone will be in the market for a Tesla in any format for some time until the cost drops.
NVidia have seemed to try and make their technology as widely available as possible to this point, so hopefully, this iray -CUDA developmewnt is not different.

I can see how you would cry out for a Tesla right now though with this development and your situation...that looks like a pure profit reaping / pillaging solution in cases of tying up multiple workstations rendering and / or animating...you would be in heaven and your employers laughing all the way to the bank.

I seek to learn more.
cheers
trombe

[ry]

Before you go out and buy a Tesla card I would be very careful. I can guarantee as of right now that any kind of Cuda based GPU rendering will not work with Revit right now. You can possibly write a custom script to make it do some thing in 3DS Max. GPU based rendering using Cuda is supposed to work with Maya. If iRay is using the Nvidia GPU rendering then it is based off of the Cuda language.

[trombe]

Hi ry,
so do you think we should ask the Revit manufacturer if mental ray in Revit will be able to take advantage of iray and the tesla-cuda system or wait and see if they take it up ?
I am keen on seeing improvements in mental ray within Revit on a variety of fronts.
This is a new one that looks more than significant once again.
regards
trombe

[aaronrumple]

Before you go out and buy a Tesla card I would be very careful. I can guarantee as of right now that any kind of Cuda based GPU rendering will not work with Revit right now. You can possibly write a custom script to make it do some thing in 3DS Max. GPU based rendering using Cuda is supposed to work with Maya. If iRay is using the Nvidia GPU rendering then it is based off of the Cuda language.

We don't render in Revit. We design in Revit. Do CD's in Revit. But we've never rendered anything other than out of curiosity. It just isn't fast enough for our needs.

We've got a full rendering setup with Max/Mental Ray/Vray/Backburner and rendering farm.

I'm guessing the issue of CPU/GPU rendering is made through which software you install. The GPU will be CUDA code so I'm pretty sure this will be a separatly installed software or maybe an option selected during installation.

[aaronrumple]

Here's some info on iray that was posted over at Vizdepot. It gives a better idea of performance.
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From Jeff Mottle:

Hi all,

Just thought I would clear up some of the misconceptions about iray. I had a chance to play with it today and speak with the VP of development and the CEO for mental images.

The demo in the video was using iray with reality server. Reality server allows you to connect multiple GPU servers together. There were 15 GPUs total (FX 5800) for this demo. In this demo they were showing it via the web interface, which allows you to interact with the scene. What you are being served are series of JPEG images.

You can however also use iray on a single GPU on a desktop. Any card that supports CUDA will run iray. I played with both the web and desktop versions. On the desktop I saw the performance of one FX 5800 and four FX 5800. In the demo, you could tell iray how many GPUs you wanted to use. The speed in linear, so 4 GPUs is 4 times faster than 1. Even with 1 GPU it was still pretty fast and with the ray brush, which allows you to focus all of the rendering power in one area, it was very usable. With 4 GPUs a 1K frame with 70 IES area lights rendered to near 100% convergence in only 3-4 minutes. Very impressive.

The demo that Chaos Group showed was no where near as complex in terms of lighting or materials as the iray demo, so you can't really compare the two. It's hard to say which is faster as the scenes and card specs are not the same. Based on what I have seen so far, I think iray is a much more usable solution, however I'm sure the next Chaos demo will have some equally impressive features and quality improvements.

I'll have some more videos to show soon, so you can see the exact speeds and quality. I'll likely also have a copy of iray to use for the upcoming video card tests. End users are not likely going to see iray for a while though. If you consider that Autodesk only received their copy a few weeks ago and if you look at the current release cycles, it's a likely assumption that iray will not be available until 2011 in 3ds Max.
__________________
-Monty

[trombe]

Here's some info on iray that was posted over at Vizdepot. It gives a better idea of performance.
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Aaron, you have done well.
thanks for that note.
What was it that Captain Haddock from TinTin would say ? "blue blistering barnacles !"

Where to from here then ? (you won't care about this but I have been rattling on about mr in Revit for a while) .....
trombe