My work in GPU competition (iray)

Winners of the contest here.

I am looking forward to see they make a better iray in next 3ds max version, too. Especially the material types support(at least please give me back the standard material type to choose). I like the "very clear" rendering preset. I dont have to learning the various Proper nouns every time. It is not off the topic for everybody in the forum 'cause I get a lot of knowledge from it:) Thanks all!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]39931[/ATTACH]Render times with iRay can indeed be quite long or quite short depending on what you're rendering. You can't really compare mental ray renderings with iRay because you're comparing two different animals - one emulates real light (iRay), while the other (mental ray) tries to imitate it. The attached image was done with 3ds max/iRay - I let it run for 10 minutes, but could not detect any changes after 5. I just can't get that kind of light quality out of mental ray. My submission to the GPU competition was run for 9 hours and 37 minutes and it still looked noisy - I'm hoping for some big improvements from Autodesk and nVidia in the near future.

Vray RT-GPU is also brute force. I don't know why anybody here would be surprised by all this. I've been saying this for months :) And Brad from Luxology put out that video back in July or August.

Unfortunatly iray is another victum to over zellouse and misleading marketing. Had they marketed it as an unbiased, brute force render, ala maxwell, I think we wouldn't be as dissapointed as we are. Where they did do a head to head comparison with mentalray, even that was misleading in that the example was reverce engineered to mentals disadvantage by using heavey handed settings to give a poor result for a long render time. for me irays disspointment is more down to its lack of support for certain shader types that I use offten, such as gradient ramps and colour correct. Hopefully they will be implented in future releases. Having said that, I do like iray , I just dont have the patience to implement it into my everyday workflow. Sorry for straying off topic again jhv

I am curious to see what Vray's GPU version does. Is it a brute force, or is it a take off of their CPU driven RT? As for the Maxwell/iRay comment, ....there was a thread on Vizdepot where someone compared Maxwell and iRay. Each ran for 30 minutes, and the images looked nearly identical. Maxwell may have been slightly better, but for all intents and purposes, they were identical. Now the scary part of that for me is that the iRay portion was done using a combination of a Tesla 2050, and a GTX470 together. That is roughly $2,500 in video cards. http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10291 It was at this time I realized that the term real time was used loosely. Sure, if you can afford a reality server things would be real time, but I can not. Actually, I don't even know how much one costs. But back to the subject... Interesting idea, it vaguely reminds me of he GE green project. http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/landing_page It would be interesting to see this project animated.

But that's the thing, isn't it? So far all anybody's figured out for the GPU is game engine style software and brute force raytracers. Until somebody figured out how to run more optimized full render options on them, that's all we're going to get out of GPUs. How would you do the algorithm? Say you want to do IR Map, Final Gather, an adaptive sampling raytracer - any of these require basing the amount of sampling on information gleaned from context and feedback, but all you've got is 400 threads running on a processor with a much more limited instruction set than a CPU that's not designed for this at all, and maybe 2GB if you're lucky.

the long render times are not due to GPU but rather due to the Brute Force nature of iray. Its more like maxwell. Anyway, Nice concept, pity the clouds cover too much though. jhv

Thanks for comments. I created it while free time after work. There's still a lot of detail I should notice of. Actually, I was testing the GPU performance, too. And in this progress I aslo had some problem with this new "iray" rendering. I think it is the problem of mental ray. Anyway, I still had fun with it :)

The PC specs that I see people using iRay is one or two Tesla boards or four 480GTX NVidia cards to render a scene!!! :( It seems like the old times of Max3.0 and Mental Ray, when I left my PC (Pentium)render a scene from a friday night till monday morning just before to go to the Ad agency... ;)

Every time I read something like that my enthusiasm for GPUs drops down a notch.

Nine hours with an 460GTX is reasonable for iRay... :(

Nice work. Only three things: -The textures and elements are a bit more repetitive than you'd normally want. -The cloud makes it difficult to read the text. -9 hours? This doesn't have anything to do with criticizing the image, but at 9 hours the CPU and mental ray would have done at least as good a job.

Nice concept.