Since the advent and development of GPU rendering, more and more software vendors are focusing on developing render engines that can leverage the power of Multi-GPU. In today’s article, let’s take a look at the software that can render with multiple GPUs at the same time and bring much faster corresponding rendering speed.

Redshift is a production-quality, GPU-accelerated renderer with support for biased global illumination techniques. It offers a pretty comprehensive toolset to up their render output, in terms of both quality and volume, as it is both powerful and efficient. Supporting the latest developments in shader technology and volumetrics, there is clearly a lot on offer, and it’s easy to see how Redshift could fit into many different pipelines and workflows.

As we all know, Redshift’s performance scales very well across multiple GPUs.

Besides, Redshift supports “out of core” rendering, which means that if a GPU runs out of memory (due to a large number of polygons or textures in the scene), it will use the system’s memory instead. This can have a performance cost in some cases, so it is usually better to use GPUs with as much VRAM as you can afford to minimize the performance impact. Certain types of data (such as textures) work extremely well with out-of-core rendering. This means that even if your scene includes 4K/8K textures, you can still expect fast rendering.

OTOY is proud to advance state of the art graphics technologies with groundbreaking machine learning optimizations, out-of-core geometry support, massive 10-100x speed gains in the scene graph, and RTX ray tracing GPU hardware acceleration. Octane is tightly integrated into many modelling software. Much of Octane’s functionality can be found in the Render Setup window. The latest version of Octane now includes a menu item as well which can be used to set Octane as the current renderer.

Octane RTX hardware acceleration brings 2-5x render speed increases to NVIDIA ray tracing GPUs with multi-GPU support. RTX acceleration speed gains increase in more complex scenes and can be benchmarked using RTX OctaneBench.

Octane comes in 3 versions. For Octane Studio editions which have 2 GPU limit, you can only maximize render with 2GPU acceleration, for Octane Enterprise and Octane Enterprise+ editions, there’s no limit on the number of GPUs at all, the more GPUs you have, the faster your render speed is multiplied.

Maxwell Render is an unbiased 3D render engine, developed by Next Limit Technologies in Madrid, Spain. This stand-alone software is used in the film, animation, and VFX industry, as well as in architectural and product design visualization. Its trademark Multilight feature, which permits the changing of light intensity and colors in real-time, was used in the feature film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The GPU engine is an alternative to the CPU engine. It enables you to compute renders using your GPUs (graphics cards). They are typically much faster than CPUs, especially when using multiple graphics cards. Many lines of code have been changed in this version to make the GPU engine even faster and to allow for the rendering of larger images.

Hardware requirements for GPU engines

• Graphics cards must be CUDA-based. Because the GPU engine is built on Nvidia’s CUDA computing platform, only Nvidia graphics cards will work. AMD or Intel graphics cards will not work.
• Microarchitectures such as Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing, and Ampere are supported (compute capability 5.0 and up). Although the Kepler architecture is not supported, cards based on it may work.
• It is critical to keep graphics card drivers up to date.

Maxwell 5, for a “more than 50x speed-up, this plugin compared with a high-end CPU”. With multiple GPUs working in parallel you’ll get an unprecedented experience. To put it another way, with Maxwell 5, time is now in your hands. In addition, Multilight now runs on the GPU engine, while the GPU engine itself now natively supports Nvidia’s new Ampere GPUs, including the GeForce RTX 30 Series. The new version also provides integrated cloud rendering for use across an internal network or third-party render farms.

FStorm is a GPU-only renderer being developed by PinkSoft LTD since 2015 and becomes the most popular GPU render with architectural 3d artists due to its speed, quality and simplicity.  It is one of the best render engines for 3Dsmax. FStorm is straightforward, fast, and realistic with convenient materials and light sources. Hope that this amazing renderer will be available for major 3D software in the near future.

There are many unique features in FStorm renderer such as improved tone mapping, glossy reflection shader, glare effects, light sampling, improved raytracer, and optimized QMC sampling. Build-in scene converter easily and carefully converts any scene from Corona, Octane, and Vray render. Users can move the camera and get real-time updates in the frame buffer window.

FStorm Render is based on CUDA technology, which allows this renderer to work well on NVIDIA graphics cards. Interestingly, FStorm is likely to be compatible with multiple GPUs on one computer. For instance, if it’s scalable to 6 or 10 GPUs simultaneously in a single machine, users can utilize the robust computing system to render their job while using FStorm Render.

iRender is a Professional GPU-Acceleration Cloud Rendering Service provider in PC optimization for rendering tasks, CGI, VFX with over 20.000 customers and being appreciated in many global rankings (e.g. CGDirector, Lumion Official, Radarrender, InspirationTuts CAD, All3DP). We provide a variety of servers having Processor AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX with a high clock speed of 3.9 GHz– 4.7GHz and 2TB SSD to load your scene fast. Besides, the power of 2/4/6/8 x  NVIDIA RTX 3090 will certainly make you satisfied.

Users will remotely connect and take full control of it. Using our remote computer is no different from your local computer. You can install any plugin you want for only one time. You can have a look at server specs that iRender is now offering:

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3Dsmax & Vray is a production-proven rendering software. Known for its versatility and ability to handle any type of project — from massive, dynamic scenes having thousands of lights to a sublime still life — it is the go-to solution for artists and designers across 3D industries.  

Being known as the world’s most complete 3D rendering software for high-end visualization and production, this is a super perfect match. Last week, we already compared the performance in Redshift and Cinema4D. In this article today, iRender will continue to do another test to see how well does rendering speed scale across multiple GPUs in Vray & 3Dsmax.

Because the new RTX cards take advantage of RT cores in Vray Next, we will do the test with the beast RTX 3090 – based on the Ampere architecture. We think it’s fair to call this card a “beast”, not only because it will prove to be the fastest gaming and creator GPU on the market, but also because it will take up three PCI slots in your PC. To see how increasing the number of video cards in a system affects performance in Vray with the new GeForce 30 Series (Ampere architecture), we will compare the render time in Vray 5 and 3Dsmax 2020 from one GPU RTX 3090 to eight GPUs RTX 3090. Particularly, our project size is 4000p x 2200p at 1000 samples and the noise limit is 0.01.

For our test platform, we wanted to use a high clock speed processor so that the video cards could really shine. Because we do the test on multiple GPUs, we also needed a platform that would support as many video cards as possible in a large tower workstation. Given that combination of goals, the configurations which made the most sense was AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX. That provided the right PCI-Express slot layout for up to eight GPUs, and the clock speed runs fast: 4.3GHz base and up to 4.7GHz turbo.

The new Hybrid Rendering mode (since V-Ray 3.6) only works with CUDA mode, which requires NVIDIA graphics cards. Users using AMD will not get the embree acceleration because that’s an NVIDIA bonus. When the engine is set to V-Ray GPU with RTX enabled, V-Ray GPU uses the RT Cores in NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Render speed is primarily determined by the number of CUDA cores (the more the better) and the GPU’s clock speed. 

The GPU-accelerated version of 3Dsmax & Vray is able to utilize multiple GPUs and does so very effectively. It will not be a perfect “4 GPUs is 4x faster”, but you can expect significant performance improvements with every card you add. However, since V-Ray is using the cards for compute purposes they do not need to be in SLI mode. Looking just at the results of secondary cards, we can see that stacking a few of those will give fantastic rendering performance. According to the iRender test with RTX 3090, it is almost perfect scaling from 1 -> 2 – > 4 GPUs. Particularly, scaling from the second video card is still respectable – in the range of 29% to 57% improvement. This mirrors what we have seen in some other GPU rendering engines, like OctaneRender. That’s the reason we recommend using at least 2 GPUs for V-ray and 3Dsmax to get the best performance.

In particular, a single RTX 3090 takes 26m39s to render a still image. This may be an acceptable number for a local computer, but in this test, we want to analyze more about the performance. As demonstrated above, it is undeniable that our workstation needs at least 2 GPU if you are using this GPU-accelerated engine, therefore, we continued to test our server 4A and 5P then we got amazing results: dual RTX 3090 cut render time to 18m55s while with six GPUs it took only 11m38s.

Since the 6th and 8th cards were added, you may see it’s not a linear increase because sometimes it depends on the model that you’re running. However, the render time is still impressive for large projects that have a tight deadline (respectively 9m40s and 8m02s). It isn’t quite perfect – there is some level of diminishing returns – but it is still more than enough to justify their use in multi-GPU workstations and be super helpful for large projects. You can also do your test by signing up for an account here!

In addition to the RT Cores, the new RTX cards also support NVLink, which gives V-Ray GPU the ability to share the memory between two GPUs; this has some impact on rendering speed. And in this benchmark, Chaosgroup aims to measure it. In order to enable NVLink, the cards need to be connected with a special NVLink connector (also called NVLink Bridge). For NVLink to work on Windows, GeForce RTX cards must be put in SLI mode from the NVIDIA control panel (this is not required for Quadro RTX cards, nor is it needed on Linux, and it’s not recommended for older GPUs). If the SLI mode is disabled, NVLink will not be active. 

Note that the available memory for GPU rendering is not exactly doubled with NVLink; V-Ray GPU needs to duplicate some data on each GPU for performance reasons, and it needs to reserve some memory on each GPU as a scratchpad for calculations during rendering. Still, using NVLink allows us to render much larger scenes than would fit on each GPU alone. iRender support NVlink here!

For truly photorealistic renders, you want a raytracer that’s built for quality, optimized for speed, and ready to scale. V-Ray gives you the power to work with lightning-fast interactive and heavyweight production rendering—all while getting the most from your CPU and GPU hardware. Check out iRender workflow below:

If new hardware is not in your budget right now, join iRender and cut your render times in half with just some minor time investment from 3.8$. We do the rendering, the creativity is yours!

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In the recent updates to V-Ray, an area that has generally seen the most considerable advancement is V-Ray GPU. From V-Ray 3.0 to 3.6, many features, optimizations and speed boosts have been added to V-Ray GPU. V-Ray Next for Maya is no exception to this, therefore, in this article, we will attempt to list some of the most notable improvements that users can now benefit from in the latest release. Besides, iRender will introduce the high-speed GPU Cloud Render for V-Ray Next & Maya.

The first thing you can notice is that, without doing anything to your settings and merely opening an old scene in V-Ray Next, your render will be approximately twice as fast. The biggest reason for this is the new architecture of V-Ray GPU: instead of a mega-kernel architecture, V-Ray GPU now uses a multi-kernel architecture. This approach is particularly effective on newer GPU hardware making V-Ray GPU nearly twice as fast — and this positions us well for the future. As new hardware and GPU drivers get released, the new code will take advantage of it and bring artists additional acceleration, such as support for the dedicated RT Cores inside the new RTX cards.

For this first set of tests, Chaosgroup measured the pure CUDA performance of the RTX 1080Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti cards and compared them to the RT Core support enabled. For these benchmarks, they used: AE13-008, White Room, AI13-008 scenes. There are still many improvements that are expected to increase performance further.

For the three scenes, the RT Cores provide a speedup of 1.78x, 1.53x and 1.47x respectively compared to the pure CUDA version. To be honest, it is an impressive result, almost double for each scene without doing anything to your settings.

In addition to the RT Cores, the new RTX cards also support NVLink, which gives V-Ray GPU the ability to share the memory between two GPUs; this has some impact on rendering speed — and in this benchmark, Chaosgroup aims to measure it. In order to enable NVLink, the cards need to be connected with a special NVLink connector (also called NVLink Bridge). For NVLink to work on Windows, GeForce RTX cards must be put in SLI mode from the NVIDIA control panel (this is not required for Quadro RTX cards, nor is it needed on Linux, and it’s not recommended for older GPUs). If the SLI mode is disabled, NVLink will not be active. 

Note that the available memory for GPU rendering is not exactly doubled with NVLink; V-Ray GPU needs to duplicate some data on each GPU for performance reasons, and it needs to reserve some memory on each GPU as a scratchpad for calculations during rendering. Still, using NVLink allows us to render much larger scenes than would fit on each GPU alone.

GPU rendering in V-Ray has always been a progressive renderer; this allowed users to see their renderings progressively refined as a complete image and update on-the-fly when in IPR mode. While this can be very useful as an interactive tool, there are still advantages to rendering in buckets — especially when it comes to final frame rendering.

The first advantage is speed. Generally speaking, if you are using a single GPU on your system, you will not see much difference in the speed between Progressive and Bucket mode. However, there could be a more significant difference in speed when running multiple GPUs. Tomasz Wyszolmirski, Studio Director at Dabarti found that, if you use distributed rendering to multiple computers, bucket rendering starts to provide a real advantage more and more. 

But speed is not the only reason to decide to use Bucket mode instead of Progressive for GPUs. Bucket rendering also allows for the addition of some new features that were not possible in Progressive mode. While in Bucket mode, users can now add the popular Cryptomatte render element or deep image output in V-Ray GPU.

One of the most anticipated V-Ray GPU features is the ability to render volumes. Not only has this feature been added in V-Ray Next & Maya, but it is also one of the fastest volume ray tracers around. We can’t compare it to previous versions of V-Ray GPU because it’s a new feature. However, users will see that the GPU performs extremely well when rendering volumes.

V-Ray GPU can now render environment fog, as well as volume grids, which can also allow you to render OpenVDB files. Also, you can add 3D textures to the volume grid to be able to add interesting details to your volume. 

Since we are talking about Vray GPU, unsurprisingly, the graphics card configuration has the most significant impact on the performance of render process.  In V-Ray 3.6, low settings for displacement did not necessarily achieve the most pleasing results. The workaround was to crank up subdivisions high enough to get your desired quality. One of the side effects was that it required a lot more geometry, which put a strain on the GPU memory — which can be at a premium.

The following example shows the displacement in V-Ray 3.6 using a subdivision of 2 and 8. You’ll notice that we need to crank up the quality of the displacement to 8 to get the desired effect, which means we need at least 8 gigabytes of GPU ram to hold the geometry.

In V-Ray Next for Maya, you’ll notice below that, at a subdivision of 2, you can get nearly identical quality as with a subdivision of 8.

Furthermore, the new Hybrid Rendering mode (CPU + GPUs) in V-Ray 3.6 only works with CUDA mode, which requires NVIDIA graphics cards. Users using AMD will not get the embree acceleration because that’s an NVIDIA bonus. When the engine is set to V-Ray GPU with RTX enabled, V-Ray GPU uses the RT Cores in NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Render speed is primarily determined by the number of CUDA cores (the more the better) and the GPU’s clock speed. 

As with previous analysis, we recommend NVIDIA RTX GPU with at least 8GB VRAM:

• RTX 3070 8GB – As a budget option this card is quite impressive, beating all previous-gen cards, but for the additional $200 the RTX 3080 is definitely more appealing with ~30% faster rendering and 20% more VRAM unless it just doesn’t fit in your budget.
• RTX 3080 10GB – This card is more affordable and offers better rendering performance-per-dollar if you consider the card alone. However, its lower amount of VRAM (compared to the RTX 3090) may limit the complexity of scenes you can render and it lacks NVLink support as well.
• RTX 3090 24GB – This card is about 20% faster for rendering than the RTX 3080, with 140% more onboard memory and support for NVLink. That means it will be much better suited to working with large scenes and detailed geometry.

The GPU-accelerated version of V-Ray is able to utilize multiple GPUs and does so very effectively. It will not be a perfect “4 GPUs is 4x faster”, but you can expect significant performance improvements with every card you add. However, since V-Ray is using the cards for compute purposes they do not need to be in SLI mode.

Running multiple GeForce RTX 30 Series video cards provides excellent scaling in V-Ray Next GPU. Looking just at the results of secondary cards, we can see that stacking a few of those will give fantastic rendering performance. It is almost perfect scaling from 1 -> 2 – > 3 GPUs. Especially, scaling from a second video card is still respectable – in the range of 83 to 93% improvement. This mirrors what we have seen in some other GPU rendering engines, like OctaneRender. That’s the reason we recommend using at least 2 GPUs for V-Ray Next & Maya to get the best performance.

At iRender, we have developed multiple RTX 3090 workstations specifically optimized and configured for GPU rendering workflows, from single- GPU 1x RTX 3090 to Multi-GPU 2/4/6/8 x RTX 3090, you can choose one server that is suitable for your demand and your software to get started. You are guaranteed to experience maximum performance for your budget.

Users will remotely connect to our server, install their software only one time and easily do any intensive tasks like using their local computers. We offer clients the powerful processor Intel Xeon W-2245 @ 3.90GHz / AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX @ 3.90GHz and up to 1 TB SSD to load your scene quickly.

Moreover, on-demand NVLink helps you increase the amount of VRAM to 24 x 2 = 48 GB which is powerful enough for very large projects/cache. We are confident that we are the only render farm where you can experience NVLink and Multi-GPU with Vray. This November, we are offering you a discount of 20%, you only need to pay 12 USD for one hour using 4x RTX 3090 and maximize your speed.

In parallel with providing a variety of additional features for users such as Snapshot, Clone, NV Link, APIs,… iRender team has developed iRender mobile app to help users to render on a mobile phone.  With all the outstanding advantages mentioned above, you must have found yourself the perfect choice for V-RAY. We provide unmatched support tailored to your specific needs and goals. SPECIAL OFFER for this November: Get 50% BONUS for all newly registered users. Let’s CHECK IT OUT!

3DsMax is a computer graphics program for creating 3D models, animations, and digital images. It’s one of the most popular programs in the computer graphics industry and is well known for having a robust toolset for 3D artists.

In this article, we are going to focus on the big five: Redshift, Octane, Maxwell, V-Ray and Fstorm, which are the five most render engines supporting most major 3D platforms (Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, etc). One intention of our testing is to discover the best render engines for 3Dsmax, and, from experience we’ve come to expect some and sometimes many surprises.

Redshift Rendering Technologies Inc was founded in early 2012 in Newport Beach, California with the goal of developing a production-quality, GPU-accelerated renderer with support for the biased global illumination techniques. It offers a pretty comprehensive toolset for any 3DsMax user looking to up their render output, in terms of both quality and volume, as it is both powerful and efficient. Supporting the latest developments in shader technology and volumetrics, there is clearly a lot on offer, and it’s easy to see how Redshift could fit into many different pipelines and workflows.

While there is a certain amount of competition out there this can only be a good thing. As long as the development team keeps up with what they have done here, there is definitely a bright future in store for Redshift. 

Redshift has the capability of “out of core” rendering which means that if a GPU runs out of memory (because of too many polygons or textures in the scene), it will use the system’s memory instead. In some situations, this can come at a performance cost so it is typically better to use GPUs with as much VRAM as you can afford in order to minimize the performance impact. Certain types of data (like textures) actually work very well with out-of-core rendering. This means that even if your scene uses the 4K/8K textures, you can still expect great rendering performance and one of the best render engines for 3Dsmax!

OTOY is proud to advance state of the art graphics technologies with groundbreaking machine learning optimizations, out-of-core geometry support, massive 10-100x speed gains in the scene graph, and RTX ray tracing GPU hardware acceleration. Octane is tightly integrated into 3ds max. Much of Octane’s functionality can be found in the Render Setup window. The latest version of Octane now includes a menu item as well which can be used to set Octane as the current renderer.

Octane RTX hardware acceleration brings 2-5x render speed increases to NVIDIA ray tracing GPUs with multi-GPU support. RTX acceleration speed gains increase in more complex scenes and can be benchmarked using RTX OctaneBench.

Maxwell Render is an unbiased 3D render engine, developed by Next Limit Technologies in Madrid, Spain. This stand-alone software is used in the film, animation, and VFX industry, as well as in architectural and product design visualization. Its trademark Multilight feature, which permits the changing of light intensity and colors in real-time, was used in the feature film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

If you have ever heard that Maxwell is slow. Well, it was. Our commitment to developing the most accurate render engine on the market wasn’t negotiable. The story has changed in Maxwell 5. A fully rewritten multi-GPU core now delivers final results in minutes. So, you get accurate previews in seconds, keeping physical accuracy intact. 

Maxwell 5, for a “more than 50x speed-up, this plugin compared with a high-end CPU”. With multiple GPUs working in parallel you’ll get an unprecedented experience. To put it another way, with Maxwell 5, time is now in your hands. In addition, Multilight now runs on the GPU engine, while the GPU engine itself now natively supports Nvidia’s new Ampere GPUs, including the GeForce RTX 30 Series. The new version also provides integrated cloud rendering for use across an internal network or third-party render farms.

Vray is one of the best render engins for 3Dsmax, it was developed by the Bulgarian company Chaos Group, which was established in Sofia in 1997. It is a commercial plug-in for third-party 3D computer graphics software applications and is used for visualizations and computer graphics industries such as media, entertainment, film and video game production, industrial design, product design, and architecture.

Chaos Group has two different versions of their rendering engine: (1) V-Ray Next CPU and (2) V-Ray Next GPU (previously V-Ray Adv and V-Ray RT, respectively). The first is a CPU-based rendering engine that benefits greatly from having a high number of CPU cores. In fact, it scales almost perfectly with more cores which makes a high core count CPU – and even configurations with multiple physical CPUs – excellent for performance. On the other hand, V-Ray Next GPU (V-Ray RT) uses GPUs – as the name indicates – to perform the rendering calculations.

The GPU-accelerated version of V-Ray is able to utilize multiple GPUs and does so very effectively. It will not be a perfect “4 GPUs is 4x faster”, but you can expect significant performance improvements with every card you add. However, since V-Ray is using the cards for compute purposes they do not need to be in SLI mode.

FStorm is a GPU-only renderer being developed by PinkSoft LTD since 2015 and becomes the most popular GPU render with architectural 3d artists due to its speed, quality and simplicity.  It is one of the best render engines for 3Dsmax. FStorm is straightforward, fast, and realistic with convenient materials and light sources. Currently, FStorm render engine is exclusively available for 3Ds Max software. Hope that this amazing renderer will be available for major 3D software in the near future.

There are many unique features in FStorm renderer such as improved tone mapping, glossy reflection shader, glare effects, light sampling, improved raytracer, and optimized QMC sampling. It is deeply integrated into the 3Ds Max environment and supports all necessary and key features. Build-in scene converter easily and carefully converts any scene from Corona, Octane, and Vray render. Users can move the camera and get real-time updates in the frame buffer window.

FStorm Render is based on CUDA technology, which allows this renderer to work well on NVIDIA graphics cards. Interestingly, FStorm is likely to be compatible with multiple GPUs on one computer. For instance, if it’s scalable to 6 or 10 GPUs simultaneously in a single machine, users can utilize the robust computing system to render their job while using FStorm Render.

iRender is a Professional GPU-Acceleration Cloud Rendering Service provider in PC optimization for rendering tasks, CGI, VFX with over 20.000 customers and being appreciated in many global rankings (e.g. CGDirector, Lumion Official, Radarrender, InspirationTuts CAD, All3DP). We provide a variety of servers having Processor Xeon W-2245 CPU with a high clock speed of 3.9 GHz– 4.7GHz and up to 1TB SSD to load your scene fast. Besides, the power of 2/4/6 x  NVIDIA RTX 3090 will certainly make you satisfied.

Users will remotely connect and take full control of it. Using our remote computer is no different from your local computer. You can install any plugin you want for only one time.

Through this article, you can see clearly each render engine has its own advantages. You should review and rate to find one of the best render engines for 3Dsmax or your work. Finally, iRender hopes this article will be helpful for you.

We often have attractive promotions to thank our beloved customers. SPECIAL OFFER for this September: Get 50% BONUS for all newly registered users. Moreover, enjoy a trial here to stop wasting pointless hours of rendering. We do the rendering, the creativity is yours!

iRender – Happy Rendring!

Source: pugetsystems.com