Enivob
After recreating your scene, Karma still produces the same results, near 100% cuda load during render. If you think about it, you want low power consumption. That means a smaller electric bill.
Ah yes, that's a valid positive aspect of it. But to be honest, I'd rather prefer short bursts of maximum power.
jsmack
Does it say "failed" under optix?
As a matter of fact it does. I launched Houdini from terminal, and it complains that:
KarmaXPU: Failed to initialize Optix 70400 [Unsupported ABI version] (maybe old driver? requires 495.46+)
And that's not good, because on Debian (even on Testing, which I'm using) there's no perspective of upgrading this driver to the required version in the near future. 510.x has already been stuck in Debian experimental since early June, and before that there was another 5xx version which wasn't pushed even to Sid. The next version which will hit Testing is most likely 470.129.06, which still doesn't match Houdini requirements.
I'd like to avoid installing the driver directly from upstream, as there's a high probability of it messing up my system and giving life to a Frankendebian (
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian).
Anyway, H19 had identical nvidia driver requirements, and yet GPU utilization was always at 100%, even when rendering simple USD scenes.
For example, I just made a really trivial scene (gpu_test_h19) consisting of spheres copied to points, one MaterialX shader and a dome light. I rendered it with H19.0 and H19.5. Then, I recreated the scene using operators from H19.5 (gpu_test_h19_5) and rendered it with this new Houdini version. The results are as follows:
- gpu_test_h19 renders at 100%/100% CPU/GPU load with H19.0 (it reaches full load almost immediately). When rendered with H19.5, GPU remains practically unused.
- gpu_test_h19_5 on H19.5 renders at 100% CPU and almost no GPU load.
The difference in rendering speed of gpu_test_h19 with H19.0 and rendering gpu_test_h19/gpu_test_h19_5 with H19.5 is night and day.
I wonder which aspects of Karma XPU were changed so much in H19.5, that they now require a newer ABI version.
You will find both scenes in the attachment.
jsmack
I find you need way more GPU memory than you think with XPU. 8gb on a 3070 might not be enough for even a single model with textures.
I'm not too sure about this. I mean, I never experienced that. On H19.0 I rendered quite a few scenes, some very simple, some quite heavy on textures and geometry, and GPU was always at 100% (175+ Watts) almost right off the bat. No matter what. I also never witnessed the XPU renderer running out of VRAM. It topped it, sure, but the GPU load was maintained at maximum level, so it always had something to calculate.
jsmack
where did you get the SSSMap.png? It was not in the archive I downloaded.
I don't remember. I downloaded this model years ago. If this map doesn't come with the archive, then I must have derived it from existing textures.
sekow
I am using
I didn't now about this. Thanks.
Much cleaner output than
watch -n 0.5 nvidia-smi
, so definitely very useful.