[Bf-cycles] CUDA Toolkit 6.5 and Volume on GPU

Thomas Dinges blender at dingto.org
Thu Aug 21 23:54:45 CEST 2014


Hi everyone,
NVIDIA just released the CUDA Toolkit 6.5: 
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit

I recommend an update for 2 reasons:
1) It improves rendering performance.
2) It now supports Visual Studio 2013, so no other VS or SDK 
installations are needed anymore on Windows.

I ran some benchmarks on Windows 7 x64, with a Geforce 540M (sm_21), 
master 2e5e1e2.
- cornell_box.blend (256x256 Tiles, 100 Samples)
- bmw.blend (128x128 Tiles, 100 Samples)

1) Master (Vanilla) with Toolkit 6.0
- cornell: 57.47s
- bmw: 1:53.63min

2) Master (Vanilla) with Toolkit 6.5
- cornell: 54.10s
- bmw: 1:50.10min

3) Master (with __VOLUME__) with Toolkit 6.5
- cornell: 56.15s
- bmw: 1:52.51min

4) Master (with __VOLUME__ and __VOLUME_SCATTER__) with Toolkit 6.5
- cornell: 56.99s
- bmw: 1:54.37min

I think we have 2 choices after the CUDA Toolkit upgrade:
1) Keep feature set as is, benefit from better performance
2) Enable Volume (and Volume Scatter) on GPU, performance stays roughly 
the same

Best regards,
Thomas






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