[Bf-cycles] Collecting official benchmark results

Sergey Sharybin sergey.vfx at gmail.com
Fri Oct 30 17:52:58 CET 2015


Hey everyone,

It appears that latest hardware from AMD in combination with latest beta
driver gives really good performance on OpenCL rendering, even when using
so called mega kernel. In fact, single Fiji card outperforms double D700
cards from Mac Pro by a factor of 3 here in the studio.

We would like to investigate performance on various hardware and systems
further, including:

- CPU performance
- GPU CUDA performance
- GPU OpenCL performance

That's exactly where you can help us! :)

Here are instructions how do a proper benchmark.

First of all, you need to use officially approved benchmark scenes from
[1]. You can grab then using regular SVN command:

  svn co
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/benchmarks/cycles/

Tests are to be done with latest blender builds from our buildbot [2]. This
is crucial because we like to collect performance from both split and mega
kernels and switch between them is only possible with latest builds.

In order to make sure split kernel to use do the following console trick:

Windows:

  set CYCLES_OPENCL_SPLIT_KERNEL_TEST=1
  path/to/blender.exe

Linux / OSX:

  CYCLES_OPENCL_SPLIT_KERNEL_TEST=1 path/to/blender

In order to make sure mega kernel is used use the same console trick but
use CYCLES_OPENCL_MEGA_KERNEL_TEST instead of
CYCLES_OPENCL_SPLIT_KERNEL_TEST.

Please always do final (F12) renders with the same resolution and number of
samples as stored in the file.

Sometimes it's needed to tweak tile size tho, for CPU tile size of 32x32 is
a good setting, for GPU it's 256x256.

For AMD OpenCL it's recommended to use latest 15.10beta driver.

When reporting results please include:

- Exact CPU model you used
- Exact GPU model you used
- Timing itself of the scenes you rendered
- Any modifications you did to the file

If some configuration failed to render properly it's also interesting to
know.

For now please submit results here in a reply mail or mail directly to me.
Once we've got enough data we'll do a nice spreadsheet and share all the
results.

Thanks in advance,
Happy Cycling!

[1] https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/benchmarks/cycles/
[2] https://builder.blender.org/download/

-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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