So i was messing around with the recently released benchmark from the gooseberry project, and i wanted to see
what kind of quality i could reach using my GPU (GTX 590), which does not have enough memory by a long shot (1.5GB), since the benchmark at default settings requires 8 - 12GB of ram.
But i got it to render by firstly reducing the size of the textures by a factor of 4-8 times and setting the subdivision level to 0 and the child particles amount to 0.1 via the simplify panel.
Now it renders using ca 1400 MB ram, but i still thought that’s a pretty high consumption for this scene, so i tried figure out if there was anything else in particular that was using a lot of memory, but even after i had deleted pretty much everything from the scene, GPU-Z is showing 878 MB of usage (it shows 0 MB when not rendering), and it’s the same story with the default cube scene.
So anyway, i did some comparisons with different versions of blender rendering the default cube.
2.61 - 151MB
2.62 - 168MB
2.63 - 187MB
2.64 - 159MB
2.65 - 273MB
2.66 - 263MB
2.67 - 262MB
2.68 - 276MB
2.69 - 372MB
2.70 - 373MB
2.71 - 397MB
2.72 - 604MB
2.73 - 857MB
2.74 - 859MB
I know this development at least partly can be explained by new features to the renderer, but still don’t understand how it could get this high? I would expect the baseline memory consumption to not be that much higher than the compiled kernel itself, but this is clearly not the case - as the .cubin files are just 2-5 MB in size.
Does anyone know how there can be such a big discrepancy?
Finally here are some renderings from the benchmark, showing the increased quality that can be achieved by simply using an earlier version of blender.
Blender 2.74.1 (child particles at 0.1) approx 1400MB
Blender 2.71 (child particles at 0.25) approx 1400MB
- As a side note if you want to try the benchmark using the GPU, you should probably turn off MIS for the environment, as there seem to be a bug involving the particular .exr file used and MIS with gpu rendering - on my machine i just get a very dark image if i don’t.
I tested baseline consumption of the 2.17 version of the octane renderer as well, and it showed 136MB, so there might a lot of room for improvements in this area.