Pascal cards with Nuke Studio/NukeX?

[Qwertydub]

Hi - does anyone have any experience with any of the Nvidia pascal cards in a cMP running Nuke Studio/NukeX etc?

I have a gtx 980ti to get the gpu acceleration working on certain nodes like Kronos, etc. Unfortunately this card causes a ton of crashes with Nuke Studio, and I'm looking for alternatives.

For whatever reason, OpenCL support is extremely limited to just a few specific macs like the newer macbook pros and the nMP's. So it seems the only viable option for me is to stick with nvidia stuff for now. I'm going to assume that pascal cards are just as problematic for nuke and wondered if anyone here has any first hand experience?

 

[jjjoseph]

IMHO I have found NUKE to be way more stable on LINUX and Windows than MacOS. This is not because of the OS, but because of the video graphics layer and the video drivers for the GPU. It would be way more rock solid of Apple cared about its graphic layers and GPU acceleration.

Also are you using the latest and greatest MacOS, CUDA drivers and version of NUKE?
What specific mac computer are you using?

I would boot into Windows and setup your same comps over there and really test you GPU. Also if you are using NUKE studio then your computer has to have the specs to playback your image sequence and or video clips. Same applies for CACHED nodes.. Especially if your doing FLOAT.

Also Kronos is a vector based retimer that doesn't have GPU acceleration above the general GPU acceleration of the Program. So the node isn't programed to analyze your media inside the node itself(FASTER) it is using NUKES general acceleration of the program overall.

If I was going to build a NUKE comp box today, it would be Window or Linux using NVIDIA. NVIDIA is not the problem for NUKE running slow. Apple is.

Also are you not on a Maintenance Program with The Foundry?
Do you have a support ticket with them?

 

[Qwertydub]

Hi jjjoseph, thanks for taking the time to answer.

I'm probably going to switch to a linux box next year (i'm looking at you, hp z's), or possibly a new Mac Pro if they come out with something worthwhile. But for now, this is what I have and I'm just hoping to maximize my experience while I can. I also prefer the mac OS in general as I've been using it for so long - i'll switch if I have to but would rather not. (I've used nuke under linux for about 5 years to, and didn't find it all that much more stable to be honest)

I'm using a fairly specced out cMP. 12 core 3.4 Ghz cpus, 64GB ram (i know, could be better), and four card m2 ssd raid for my work drive on an amfeltec squid. (Plenty fast for 4k playback).

I own Nuke Studio and i'm using the latest versions as I'm on the maintenance program. I have the latest version of Sierra and the latest cuda and web drivers for the card.

I've spoken to the Foundry about using the 9xx line of Nvidia cards with Nuke and they didn't really have much to offer in the way of real help - basically their line is always "what if you switch to the factory card - the radeon 5770?". That makes most of my problems go away, but at a fairly big hit in rendering speeds.

Anyway, I know everything you say is probably right - but I was really hoping someone might have had similar troubles like me and switched to a pascal card to great success! One can be hopeful, no?

 

[jjjoseph]

I think it is going to be hard to a person saying Kronos crashed using a 980ti but not a Pascal 1080 or 1080ti on MacOS Sierra. I have crashed every node in Nuke and will continue to crash every node with any and all hardware configurations from now until forever.. Programs like NUKE you push to the limits on every level. It will crash.. You have to push it to the limit then back off.. When you have any program like NUKE that can go from a simple operation to an exponentially more complicated operation by moving a slider 1 increment. You will crash the program.

When I did SHAKE and we had the F_ furnace suite, that used to crash like crazy... especially trying to go from a PROXY to a full resolution. Sometimes we would only enable the full res when we dumped to a render node because the GUI graphics layer was what crashed it and once it was rendering on a farm it was fine.

Nuke files being a script make it easy to disable a crashing node by a quick textEdit so that is always great...

But crashing a specific NODE might be more about twerking that NODE or the NODES before it, and not so much the overall program and overall hardware config..

but Compositing is about tinkering.. so maybe tinker around bit.. see what happens when you change things around, or do your operations differently. or cache a few nodes.. etc.