This forum is now closed.
Please join us at the new Lumion Community forum.
Lumion Community
Use your email address and password from the old forum to log in if your account was created before Feb 20 2020.
Otherwise, you will need to create a new Lumion Account at the new forum.

Author Topic: Timeline for SLI, Crossfire, Multi-GPU, and/or Render Farm option?  (Read 4346 times)

Member172621

    Reputation: 0
July 18, 2014, 02:15:34 am
Hi,
    Is there any kind of timeline for accelerating Lumion rendering performance?  This seems to be a sore spot with developers because it keeps getting asked over and over.  I'm just wondering if there's any insight into plans for the future?

Personally, I'm an IT Administrator and I try to equip my users as best I can within financial reason.  I have my designer set up with a nVidia GTX780 Ti 3GB but I have 40 other PCs that could be put to great use.

Quad dual GPU systems in high end gaming rigs are starting to become common.  If I could build a system like that for my designer and cut his animation render times down from 5-12 hours to 1-2 hours, it'd be AMAZING.

Again, I'm not trying to anger the Lumion developers by asking this yet again.  I just think that if you post a timeline or at least pin a thread in your FAQ section specifically about SLI/Crossfire/Multi-GPU/Render Farms, it'd help with the aggravation.  Both to the users wondering why it's not implemented yet and for the developers who are sick of answering the question.

Just my $0.02, wouldn't a Render Farm be the easiest to implement?  An MP4 can simply be stitched together with a binary copy.  Just create a headless service that runs on the farm PCs.  Have the render manager dole out the number of frames to be rendered based on the Lumion performance score of each farm PC.  Include a wake-on-lan function to wake any sleeping farm PCs up.  I could then pick up a bunch of $300 video cards and go to town.  Heck, I could even put them in as secondary cards, not hook up a monitor to that card, and the users would never know that they are part of the farm.  Well other than the heat and Lumion chewing up a bunch of RAM. ;)

You could even do a similar thing within a multi-GPU system.  Just run multiple instances of Lumion.  Yeah, it'd require an insane amount of RAM but there's workstation/server mobos that will handle more RAM that I can afford.


Thanks for your time.

Ben

Re: Timeline for SLI, Crossfire, Multi-GPU, and/or Render Farm option?
« Reply #1 on: July 18, 2014, 03:06:41 am »
July 18, 2014, 03:06:41 am
Hi Ben

Thanks for the feedback.

The developers have done some tests in the past on SLI.  Lots of technical issues, so was not progressed with.

Certainly there are plenty of options for further reducing the render times.  Especially with the changes in GPU hardware, and both as methods and technology to make use of.

The developers take the position that:
 [dot]  It is currently not a practice of Act-3D to indicate about what might or might not be available in future versions.  Appreciate that's not an answer, but until a feature has been developed, tested and has certainty, it is best not to provide any sort of indication about it's likelihood.

This topic does get raised from time to time, both here in the Guest Section and also in the Commercial Section.  I think it's better to allow the same question to be raised, we're happy with that and the discussion it leads to, and it helps indicate things for the developers.
IMPORTANT: Please do not send private messages and emails to members of staff - unless we specifically ask you to send us sensitive information, for example License Keys.

Member172621

    Reputation: 0
Re: Timeline for SLI, Crossfire, Multi-GPU, and/or Render Farm option?
« Reply #2 on: July 18, 2014, 06:51:20 am »
July 18, 2014, 06:51:20 am
Thanks Peter.  I figure that it was worth a shot asking about the timeline.

I can imagine that dealing with drivers involving SLI or Crossfire would be very difficult to develop.  Yet another reason to just use multiple instances of Lumion and divide up the work. :)  I'm sure it's not that simple.  What can I say, I just install and fix the software, I don't write it. :D

Member106533

    Reputation: 2
Re: Timeline for SLI, Crossfire, Multi-GPU, and/or Render Farm option?
« Reply #3 on: August 05, 2014, 03:42:49 pm »
August 05, 2014, 03:42:49 pm
A thought quick for an idea to render faster.  Would there be a possibility of creating a new type of key that would allow us to open Lumion or a version line Lumion Viewer on multiple computers for the sole purpose of rendering.  You wouldn't be able to create, add, change anything. However if you have separate camera scenes saved already, you could simply run a output to MP4.  I just run into it quite often that it would be nice to have a "rendering farm" and we have multiple computers that could run Lumion but we do not need multiple full licensed versions of Lumion on all the computers.  Just need to render.  Just a thought to add to finding a way to speed up rendering time.  Lumion is still by far the best and fastest, but faster is always better.

Thanks,

Tim

Re: Timeline for SLI, Crossfire, Multi-GPU, and/or Render Farm option?
« Reply #4 on: August 06, 2014, 12:05:05 am »
August 06, 2014, 12:05:05 am
It's an option.

Thanks for the +1 Tim M.  It has been a suggestion in the Wishlists.  Can you do a copy/paste to the Wishlist Board, so your suggestion is not lost in the general discussions, thanks.
IMPORTANT: Please do not send private messages and emails to members of staff - unless we specifically ask you to send us sensitive information, for example License Keys.