Got sick of waiting for the new Mac Pro so...

[atrox321]

I have my spys and from the official FAQ.

I'd like to use Octane Render, but I don't have a Nvidia video card.
Are OpenCL compatible cards (AMD and Intel GPUs) supported?
"No, OpenCL is currently not as mature as CUDA. As OpenCL matures, it is planned to be supported which will allow GPUs from AMD and Intel to be used with Octane Render. Currently, Octane Render requires a CUDA enabled Nvidia video card to be installed."

http://render.otoy.com/faqs.php

The titan rig sounds like a great way of farming!

You guys got a reel?

Well, the trash cans could be of some use in the future then. Nice.

I know the cards are removable in the new MacPro's, but they have a proprietary connection (of course they do) and who knows if Apple will ever license that connection.

We have no reel, because we are kind of a studio within a particular business (we only do work for our own company).

 

[beaker7]

I have my spys and from the official FAQ.

I'd like to use Octane Render, but I don't have a Nvidia video card.
Are OpenCL compatible cards (AMD and Intel GPUs) supported?
"No, OpenCL is currently not as mature as CUDA. As OpenCL matures, it is planned to be supported which will allow GPUs from AMD and Intel to be used with Octane Render. Currently, Octane Render requires a CUDA enabled Nvidia video card to be installed."

http://render.otoy.com/faqs.php

The titan rig sounds like a great way of farming!

You guys got a reel?

"Planned to be supported" "as it matures" cannot in any way be interpreted as "Is currently working on."

Especially not that dev team.

 

[flat five]

"Planned to be supported" "as it matures" cannot in any way be interpreted as "Is currently working on."

Especially not that dev team.

well if they're not 'currently working on' openCL support for their osx version, i think it's safe to say they're not working on the osx version at all.. i highly doubt they're still sitting around improving cuda functions for a platform that appears to be moving in a cuda-less direction.. it would be like developing flash based apps for iphones

 

[atrox321]

well if they're not 'currently working on' openCL support for their osx version, i think it's safe to say they're not working on the osx version at all.. i highly doubt they're still sitting around improving cuda functions for a platform that appears to be moving in a cuda-less direction.. it would be like developing flash based apps for iphones

They have a fairly large Mac base. At least for the C4D plugin version they do. Mavericks "out of the box" support for just about all nvidia cards makes it easy to keep it CUDA based on Mac.

It seems that many of the Mac guys are at least getting 680's to slap in their Macs. At this point, there really is not much difference for running Octane on Mac or PC. Same cards, same card cost and same speed in terms of GPU rendering speeds (Using only two titans on the PCs is the same speed as using two titans on the macs).

Plus i can say that Octane runs much more stable in OSX than on PC. PC version has .dll conflicts with other plugins, activation issues and mix material issues. I've had the Release Candidate 1.0 on my Mac for two weeks now with no issues (yet he still has not released the RC1 for Mac officially yet for some unknown reason. I think he likes to get PC version perfect before releasing Mac versions, but he sends me tests versions constantly), yet his PC version is still going through various release candidates trying to squash activation bugs and plugin incompatability issues.

Exciting new Octane enhancements coming with new standalone SDK. Should support compositing tag in C4D, which is my only major gripe.

 

[prowlmedia]

"Planned to be supported" "as it matures" cannot in any way be interpreted as "Is currently working on."

Especially not that dev team.

Ah well you clearly know a lot more than me

Cuda to OpenCl dev is actually a lot easier than you think.

 

[beaker7]

Cuda to OpenCl dev is actually a lot easier than you think.

lol.

Made no mention of that. I was merely reading your 'evidence' from the aging faq document.

They may very well be working on it but the FAQ does not state that.

Also, in OTOY time, even if they announce intentions of having it out in 12 months, you'll get it in 4-5 years. Should be on Mac Pro tube v3 by then.

 

[atrox321]

OK. I just PM'ed the developer of the C4D plug-in about Open CL support. I'll let you know what he gets back to me with.

 

[atrox321]

ok. Just FYI. C4D plug-in creator has heard nothing of OpenCL support coming. That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't working on it though.

 

[drewid20]

Sorry for the late response. As far as i know they are NOT working on a non-CUDA version of Octane. No OpenCL support has been announced.

As of maybe 2 weekends ago, Octane for C4D got Team Render Support. And it's glorious. However, each machine ding the render has to have the full standalone app and the C4D plugin for it to work. They have no special licensing for render nodes. But having 12 Titans attack a file at once is great,

This has me very interested. I can't seem to find much information about Team Render support from Octane. How well does it work? I'd love to build some bare bones PC GPU boxes full of Cuda cards. I've been looking into building a render farm for several months now but Octane with Team Render support for C4D seems like infinitely better solution. Hell an iMac with some brute force GPU boxes even sounds like a possible winner if that works well.

 

[calaverasgrande]

We have started doing GPU rendering using the Octane Renderer out of Cinema 4D. Amazing realistic results. We bought 2 giant PC's with 4 Titan cards each in them, but we are Mac people and wanted to be able to work on our Macs using Octane at decent speeds.

why not just set up a render farm and administer it from your macs?
Thats how we do it at my job and we run a Mac Pro headless as the farm server, and a bunch of PC's as the render nodes. It's all managed from a web browser, and I only have to see the ugly windows side of it when we update from 13 to 14 or install Poser or some other plugin.
You could just as easily use Mac's or PC's for the nodes, I believe there is a C4D Linux client but I haven't tried that yet.

 

[cnstoll]

I love the setup. Well done!

Can you post a model number or link to the external PSU? I haven't been able to find it yet.

Thanks

 

[MH01]

we don't use 8.1. i have heard horror stories. We are still on 8 and have it set so we never have to see the stupid metro interface. They came preloaded with W8 and we were fine with that. W8, W7, XP, 95... it's all ****** to my eyes

As far as the towers go, we had a gaming company called Digital Storm build them for us. gaming Rigs and GPU rigs are essentially the same thing, only GPU rigs have more GPUs than what are necessary to play games. DS had only a few options and this case was the only one they would use for our systems. 4 Titans gets pretty hot, so water cooling and a case that has a gazillion fans is necessary. Great company though. Quick build and they test the systems to their max for 3 days straight before shipping.

Interesting that you bought custom made , water cooled PCs and chose windows 8, for 11k each you should have asked for windows 7 if you wanted a stable platform.

I guess you have never met hardcore gamers / benchers. The reason top of the line PC motherboards support 4x SLI / crossfire is for gaming. You essentially bought a gaming PC. As a secondary the setup also makes a decent rendering PC. I just hope the motherboard , ram etc you bought was for a stable system and not cutting edge gaming.

Are the systems overclocked?

Loving the titans in the Mac Pro !

 

[MH01]

I love the setup. Well done!

Can you post a model number or link to the external PSU? I haven't been able to find it yet.

Thanks

Any decent modular supply will work. You do not need the same one.

And you will need to fire it up using a paper clip.

http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/testing-your-corsair-power-supply/

 

[PuppiesCakePizz]

This is the same direction I went after the delayed shipping on nMP. The initial excitement over the design (I happen to like it a lot) having faded I'm glad I switched to buying another older mac pro and dropping in a gtx.

I imagine a lot of people in similar fields going this direction. The question "why stay with mac at all?" is rearing its ugly head again though...

 

[ZnU]

I imagine a lot of people in similar fields going this direction. The question "why stay with mac at all?" is rearing its ugly head again though...

I asked myself that question following Apple's lack of a real Mac Pro upgrade last year... and subsequently answered it with untold hours of annoyance at Windows and Wintel hardware. Of course a switch might turn out totally differently for someone with different requirements, but I, for one, am firmly back in the Mac camp.

Then again, I am in post production, and this new machine is very nearly designed to be a "post production appliance."

 

[atrox321]

This has me very interested. I can't seem to find much information about Team Render support from Octane. How well does it work? I'd love to build some bare bones PC GPU boxes full of Cuda cards. I've been looking into building a render farm for several months now but Octane with Team Render support for C4D seems like infinitely better solution. Hell an iMac with some brute force GPU boxes even sounds like a possible winner if that works well.

He releases his "pre-releases" on the forums. Here you can get RC1 on Mac and RC2 on PC. Team render works, but only with machines that have Octane standalone and plugin installed. So it's not a very cheap solution yet. The new Octane SDK supports rendering nodes and once that is out, C4D Octane will support that. We have 4 machines running Octane, so only those machines are used for TR

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=36331

why not just set up a render farm and administer it from your macs?
Thats how we do it at my job and we run a Mac Pro headless as the farm server, and a bunch of PC's as the render nodes. It's all managed from a web browser, and I only have to see the ugly windows side of it when we update from 13 to 14 or install Poser or some other plugin.
You could just as easily use Mac's or PC's for the nodes, I believe there is a C4D Linux client but I haven't tried that yet.

That is fine if you are not doing GPU rendering and are not using r15. GPU rendering in not supported via NetRender. Also, r15 eliminated NetRender in favor of Team Render.

Interesting that you bought custom made , water cooled PCs and chose windows 8, for 11k each you should have asked for windows 7 if you wanted a stable platform.

I guess you have never met hardcore gamers / benchers. The reason top of the line PC motherboards support 4x SLI / crossfire is for gaming. You essentially bought a gaming PC. As a secondary the setup also makes a decent rendering PC. I just hope the motherboard , ram etc you bought was for a stable system and not cutting edge gaming.

Are the systems overclocked?

Loving the titans in the Mac Pro !

No. We just spend $22k all willy nilly.

Yes man. We know exactly what we got. I spent roughly 2 months researching, talking to manufacturers, getting ideas form the Octane community, etc. It came down to 2 companies after a month or so of research. Digital Storm and Boxx. Boxx wouldn't put 4 Titans in a single case and DS did more stress testing on the machines they built, so we went with the DS machines. Though we are currently looking again at other Boxx solutions for expansion (as well as DS again).

We NEEDED the 4XSLI. It was a mandatory thing. Yes we know these are gaming rigs and I did mention that in the thing you quoted from me. Yes, we researched and asked about just about everything in these machines.

I'm guessing you are not aware of GPU rendering. For GPU rendering, a gaming machine is a stable machine. Essentially, these machines are rendering a video game. Same stresses on the machines.

As far as Windows 8 goes, it hasn't had a single issue. DS recommends it because their software is written for it. There may be some GPU improvements too, i don't know. They stress test the hell out of everything for 3 days straight before shipping. All seems well. As long as i don't have to see the Metro interface, i'm good w/ Win8.

 

[drewid20]

He releases his "pre-releases" on the forums. Here you can get RC1 on Mac and RC2 on PC. Team render works, but only with machines that have Octane standalone and plugin installed. So it's not a very cheap solution yet. The new Octane SDK supports rendering nodes and once that is out, C4D Octane will support that. We have 4 machines running Octane, so only those machines are used for TR

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=36331

Pricing may not be ideal but it should still come out well ahead of a PCIe expansion chassis on a Mac Pro!

 

[atrox321]

Pricing may not be ideal but it should still come out well ahead of a PCIe expansion chassis on a Mac Pro!

True.

I should note that Team Render only works on multi-frame renders. It will not work for rendering one frame. The current version of Octane does not support more than one machine rendering one frame.

New version of Octane looks promising with added support for composition tags, Built in Render Clients and a bunch more. Hopefully it's out soon

 

[riggles]

either I'm missing something, or my math is way off. If the Netstor expansion chassis is $2,500 and there are $4,000 worth of Titans, isn't $6,500/render node cheaper than $11,000? Plus, wouldn't those nodes (since connected directly to a Mac via PCIe) be able to work together on one frame?

Why were the PC rigs cheaper? I'm interested because, once Octane for MODO is released, I'd like to add some more GPUs to my MP or build a GPU node.

 

[atrox321]

either I'm missing something, or my math is way off. If the Netstor expansion chassis is $2,500 and there are $4,000 worth of Titans, isn't $6,500/render node cheaper than $11,000? Plus, wouldn't those nodes (since connected directly to a Mac via PCIe) be able to work together on one frame?

Why were the PC rigs cheaper? I'm interested because, once Octane for MODO is released, I'd like to add some more GPUs to my MP or build a GPU node.

Edit: When i said our way is cheaper, i was referring to adding the Titans to the Mac's. Wasn't talking about the PC's

Well, it wasn't as simple as that in our situation. The budget for this stuff is big in our situation. We needed complete workstations to use as both GPU and CPU render nodes as well as workstations (granted, we don't do a ton of work on them, but they make for amazingly fast AE machines as well). We went with getting full fledge PC's, because we could. Expansion Chassis is the way we most likely will go for upgrading. Or a server rack from Boxx would be nice.

Still figuring it all out, but in the end, $6500+ seemed like a lot for a box of GPU's for the "higher ups" in the company.

 

[drewid20]

True.

I should note that Team Render only works on multi-frame renders. It will not work for rendering one frame. The current version of Octane does not support more than one machine rendering one frame.

New version of Octane looks promising with added support for composition tags, Built in Render Clients and a bunch more. Hopefully it's out soon

Yeah not supporting compositing tags was a big draw back. I'm glad thats coming soon. Mulit-frame renders are pretty much all I do so that's fine with me. I should be able to build a cheap i5 box for well under $1000 and then just fill it with Titans.

 

[riggles]

Edit: When i said our way is cheaper, i was referring to adding the Titans to the Mac's. Wasn't talking about the PC's
...
We needed complete workstations to use as both GPU and CPU render nodes as well as workstations...

Still figuring it all out, but in the end, $6500+ seemed like a lot for a box of GPU's for the "higher ups" in the company.

Gotcha.
Yea, as a freelancer, I will still need to support CPU rendering even after I add Octane — for feature and client compatibility. I also wondering how taxing it would be on the MPs CPUs to feed an expansion chassis with 4 Titans worth of data in addition to its own internal GPUs. Would it bottleneck?

 

[atrox321]

Gotcha.
Yea, as a freelancer, I will still need to support CPU rendering even after I add Octane — for feature and client compatibility. I also wondering how taxing it would be on the MPs CPUs to feed an expansion chassis with 4 Titans worth of data in addition to its own internal GPUs. Would it bottleneck?

I would expect some bottleneck, due to just the fact that Apple's "out of the box" drivers for nvidia cards is probably rudimentary at best. That said, i don't notice a huge difference in speeds when I tested two cards in the PC and two cards in the Macs.

 

[drewid20]

I would expect some bottleneck, due to just the fact that Apple's "out of the box" drivers for nvidia cards is probably rudimentary at best. That said, i don't notice a huge difference in speeds when I tested two cards in the PC and two cards in the Macs.

If you had to do you think you could get access to the other PCIe slots? I see it didn't matter if the slots were 4x or 16 in the benchmarks. Could you add more cards if you had the power supply or is it a matter of cooling it all?

 

[Sym0]

Yep the PC towers look gross, but a pair of silverstone tower cases would have given them a Mac Pro ish look.

Why didn't you install Windows 7 instead of 8 cos as a desktop OS it's far more useable than 8.1!

The are the same, if by useable you mean the start menu is gone, then thats easily fixed. Otherwise 8.1 boots to desktop and you wouldn't know the difference, especially if you turn of themes and run the basic grey window display theme with no effects. In that setting you could be on anything from 2000-8.1