[Bf-cycles] CUDA Memory usage: Call for testing

Thomas Dinges blender at dingto.org
Sun Jan 10 20:41:52 CET 2016


Hi everyone,

For Blender 2.72 we added the CUDA Experimental kernel, to have SSS
working on the GPU.
The reason we added an extra kernel was mainly an increased memory usage
during render.

Good news is, this extra memory usage has been fixed by Sergey. I ran
some tests and rendering several scenes with the Experimental kernel
results in no or very little extra memory. I only checked GPU memory
usage (using GPU-Z), not render time.
http://temp.dingto.org/gpu_experimental_mem.pdf

So please, could people run some tests on their own and report here?
It's very easy:
- Download latest build for your OS from the Buildbot
https://builder.blender.org/download/
- Render using the GPU, once with the Supported feature set enabled,
once with the Experimental one.
- Compare render time and GPU memory usage.

If you compile Blender yourself, make sure you use CUDA Toolkit 6.5 and
latest master.

You can use scenes from here:
- Simple scenes:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/tests/cycles/
- Larger ones:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/benchmarks/cycles/

If there is no or little memory / render time increase we can drop the
extra CUDA kernel, improving Code maintenance and CUDA compilation time.

Thanks,
Thomas


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