Bricasti M7 Native Plugin

[whyterabbyt]

Wrong counter-argument. GPUs are there because gaming industry "made them necessary". Computers were running just fine with non-3D accelerated graphics cards long before nVidia, ATi, Matrox, 3dfx, etc.

And Computers were not running just fine without 3D non-accelerated graphics, in those days people used highly expensive SGI Workstations for heavy graphics work because PC's were just not up to the task of complex 3D graphics.

If his argument was that they were fine at running 3D, then that would be a fair reply. But since he's talking about them running non-3D tasks fine, which they were.

And for the record, the SGI kit of fifteen years ago might have been better at realtime 3D, but by 2000 it was being surpassed by generic PCs; at that point in time I was getting faster renders out of £1K PCs than I was £18K SGI Octanes, and only a year or two later, a programmer colleague was able to get 3 linked generic PCs to drive the same kind of realtime immersive 3D as we'd been using a £500K SGI Onyx2 for.

That includes special effects work for the movie industry, scientific work and the games industry.
It wasn't until modern GPU's came out that performance levelled out, to the point that PC's were good enough to use and there was no need for exotic hardware such as the likes made by SGI. Ironically it was mainly former SGI engineers designing the silicon at Nvidida and ATI.

Most 'special effects' work doesnt run on the GPU, its primarily rendered using the native CPU. And whilst there are some GPU-enabled renderers today, an awful lot of what peope consider 'special effects work' consists of compositing, which rarely uses GPUs.

Additionally you could run early 3D games like Quake and Unreal with software-only rendering on the host CPU, but the performance and feature set was always severely reduced compared to running on the GPU. That's because GPUs are massively parallel (an order of magnitude more than CPUs) and have dedicated silicon dedicated specific to the task. They're not just designed for general purpose code. The gulf in performance can be proven by running benchmarks or even writing your own code and trying to do intensive tasks like global illumination, tessellation and self shadowing on a host CPU.

OTOH, these do generally get done on CPUs, when it comes to rendering.
If you've ever watched a renderfarm grind to a crawl on frames which exceed the memory of the system they're running on, and thus start swapping out, its a reminder of why raw GPU power doesnt necessarily help when you need 16Gb to calculate your frame.

For some rendering tasks, for some renderers, with specific circumstances, and particularly for realtime, with the associated compromises, GPUs make sense. But for the actual stuff you see in the movies, game cutscenes, etc, that's mainly CPU work. There's a reason VRay was native first, and the GPU based stuff is still in progress.

[v1o]

If his argument was that they were fine at running 3D, then that would be a fair reply. But since he's talking about them running non-3D tasks fine, which they were.

That's not what he said. And it's not just the gaming industry that benefited from GPUs. Windows and OSX use the GPU for transparencies for example. So even 2D graphics benefit.

And for the record, the SGI kit of fifteen years ago might have been better at realtime 3D, but by 2000 it was being surpassed by generic PCs; at that point in time I was getting faster renders out of £1K PCs than I was £18K SGI Octanes, and only a year or two later, a programmer colleague was able to get 3 linked generic PCs to drive the same kind of realtime immersive 3D as we'd been using a £500K SGI Onyx2 for.

Well that's the point. SGI became obsolete when PC's became faster (and more economical) at graphics.

Most 'special effects' work doesnt run on the GPU, its primarily rendered using the native CPU. And whilst there are some GPU-enabled renderers today, an awful lot of what peope consider 'special effects work' consists of compositing, which rarely uses GPUs.

Yes offline raytraced rendering is typically done on the CPU. Movie studios use off site render farms to do that because it takes several hours to render each frame. However GPU's are still faster for any real time 3D work - Blender for example uses GPU rendering for the live preview.

OTOH, these do generally get done on CPUs, when it comes to rendering.
If you've ever watched a renderfarm grind to a crawl on frames which exceed the memory of the system they're running on, and thus start swapping out, its a reminder of why raw GPU power doesnt necessarily help when you need 16Gb to calculate your frame.

For some rendering tasks, for some renderers, with specific circumstances, and particularly for realtime, with the associated compromises, GPUs make sense. But for the actual stuff you see in the movies, game cutscenes, etc, that's mainly CPU work. There's a reason VRay was native first, and the GPU based stuff is still in progress.

Alot of these renderers like Vray, Renderman, Mental Ray are running on legacy code more than a decade old. There is newer stuff like out there like OctaneRender and iRay that runs natively on GPUs. iRay for example has actually been used successfully for real productions.

[whyterabbyt]

If his argument was that they were fine at running 3D, then that would be a fair reply. But since he's talking about them running non-3D tasks fine, which they were.

That's not what he said. And it's not just the gaming industry that benefited from GPUs. Windows and OSX use the GPU for transparencies for example. So even 2D graphics benefit.

He said they ran fine without it, and they did.

And for the record, the SGI kit of fifteen years ago might have been better at realtime 3D, but by 2000 it was being surpassed by generic PCs; at that point in time I was getting faster renders out of £1K PCs than I was £18K SGI Octanes, and only a year or two later, a programmer colleague was able to get 3 linked generic PCs to drive the same kind of realtime immersive 3D as we'd been using a £500K SGI Onyx2 for.

Well that's the point. SGI became obsolete when PC's became faster (and more economical) at graphics.

Yes, that was my point. I was there, I realised it was happening, I made the switch when I had the chance to build a new 3d facility from scratch in 2001.

Most 'special effects' work doesnt run on the GPU, its primarily rendered using the native CPU. And whilst there are some GPU-enabled renderers today, an awful lot of what peope consider 'special effects work' consists of compositing, which rarely uses GPUs.

Yes offline raytraced rendering is typically done on the CPU. Movie studios use off site render farms to do that because it takes several hours to render each frame. However GPU's are still faster for any real time 3D work - Blender for example uses GPU rendering for the live preview.

Also my point. But the real time stuff being done in previews; That's typically a compromise compared to the full-blown CPU based render. It demonstrates what you'll get, but its not the same.

OTOH, these do generally get done on CPUs, when it comes to rendering.
If you've ever watched a renderfarm grind to a crawl on frames which exceed the memory of the system they're running on, and thus start swapping out, its a reminder of why raw GPU power doesnt necessarily help when you need 16Gb to calculate your frame.

For some rendering tasks, for some renderers, with specific circumstances, and particularly for realtime, with the associated compromises, GPUs make sense. But for the actual stuff you see in the movies, game cutscenes, etc, that's mainly CPU work. There's a reason VRay was native first, and the GPU based stuff is still in progress.

Alot of these renderers like Vray, Renderman, Mental Ray are running on legacy code more than a decade old. There is newer stuff like out there like OctaneRender and iRay that runs natively on GPUs. iRay for example has actually been used successfully for real productions.

Well, you say legacy, and I say constantly refined over tens of thousands of man-hours, but either way it hardly proves anything except for the success of the renderer in the market. And, again, since I pointed out that vray has a GPU renderer, it was clear I knew they existed. I even own a copy of OR. A significant part of my job is running 3d systems, including render farms; I like to think I might have a clue about stuff like that existing.

[NewActs]

Isnt there an IR library for the M7 already?

[Spitfire31]

An IR lib is 'frozen' snapshots and can't emulate the modulations.

/Joachim