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For any NLE professional whose head's been stuck in the sand for the past month, Avid's recently released Media Composer 6 ships with new GPU-based hardware acceleration features for the first time. Using NVIDIA CUDA-compatible GPUs, Media Composer 6 is able to greatly accelerate compute-intensive processes which were CPU-bound just a few months ago.
Cubix recently received an education on Avid Media Composer 6 from a UK-based customer. He was presented with the option of either completely replacing his current AVID workstation with a $10k dual Xeon configuration, or he could add a GPU-Xpander to his current workstation for $3k. His decision was a no-brainer!
Instead of swapping out PCIe adapters every time he changes projects in his current slot-limited PC, he attached a GPU-Xpander Desktop 4 and has all of his PCIe I/O capture cards and other related PCIe gear in the system simultaneously. This saves him time and money since he doesn't have to power down, swap out, and power-up again
Although its GPU acceleration features are limited at present, Media Composer 6 kind of reminds me of where DaVinci Resolve 7.0 was 18-24 months ago; nice single-GPU application which really hit its stride once multi-GPU configurations were enabled less than a year after 7.0 was released. Since multi-GPU configurations were enabled on Resolve a year ago, DaVinci has greatly enhanced both performance and features of Resolve to an extent which nobody 2 years ago thought possible without the use of $100k+ server farms.
Every major NLE vendor now includes GPU-accelerated features which benefit from using GPU-Xpander. Hop on the bandwagon and see how much money you can save by integrating a GPU-Xpander into your current hardware configuration instead of replacing entire workstations!
Cubix Corporation exhibited at Autodesk University in Las Vegas last week. The amount of changes coming to a wide variety of graphics design niches over the next 12-24 months is daunting, but GPU-Xpander solutions are a great example of how you can minimize the pain and expense of keeping up with the technology changes.
Take a look at the YouTube video (link above) and other related content. It's an overview of the exhibition gallery, and the many impressive applications that are either available now or will be shortly.
Eric Fiegehen
Director, Visualization and GPU Compute Solutions
ericc@cubix.com
ph +1(775)888-1000, ext 276
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a customer who did an in-depth study of unbiased, photorealistic rendering times comparing software-based, CPU renderers vs. hardware-based GPU renderers. I've got some more information to share with you, so please bear with me.
This same customer rendered an interior restaurant scene for his national fast-food chain client using 81 different camera angles. Resolution of each camera view was 1920x1080, 5000 iterations per view. How does this change the math from last month's blog post?
Let's compare the NVIDIA+BunkSpeed(or Autodesk 3ds Max with iray)+Cubix rendering costs with an online rendering service - we'll call them "X" for purposes of this comparison. Since the online service doesn't list the available resolution options or number of passes in its "Calculator" page, we'll compare a lower resolution of 1280x720 and 1500 iterations (see last month's blog for more details) in the interest of fairness. "X" requires the user to render "a few frames" on their own PC before launching render jobs at their online service. According to X's calculations, these few frames would come out to 283.5 hours for only a few of the 81 frames using 2 Xeon CPUs at 3.33Ghz clock speed - before launching the rendering job at X's website! Once the rest of the frames are launched, they estimate 68.3 hours for the remaining frames at a cost of US$2399.
Other online rendering services yielded similar results in cost, but some took days longer the X!
The Cubix customer with the 5 NVIDIA Fermi-based graphics cards + GPU-Xpander Desktop 4 would be able to completely render each frame at 1280x720 resolution, 1500 iterations, in 25 minutes. 25 minutes x81 views = 33.75 hours. In order for X's online rendering service estimate to match the Cubix GPU-Xpander + 5 NVIDIA cards, I had to increase the number of CPUs to 8 and drop the average render time per frame to 25 minutes (originally set to 3.5 hours at the speced resolution and passes for dual Xeon 3.33Ghz) - which realistically means dropping either resolution, number of passes, or (most likely) decreasing both parameters. However, X also required up to 60 hours of rendering time on the customer's own PC, so I was never going to get to an apples-to-apples comparison with company X!
You're probably asking yourself, "What's the point?" It's simple math - if you're spending less time rendering projects, you've got more time for working other projects. GPU-Xpander Desktop 4, NVIDIA graphics cards, and a CUDA-based rendering package such as Bunkspeed SHOT or MOVE pays for itself ($6500-$15k+, depending upon quantity of GPUs and type of NVIDIA graphics products used) within a few rendering jobs! You'll be able to price your services accordingly, since the price for online rendering services continues to add-up, while your GPU-Xpander configuration saves you and your clients money with each additional frame rendered.
Cubix + NVIDIA + CUDA-based 3rd party renderer = More high-quality rendered images in a fraction of the time as online rendering services, for far less money after only a few render jobs.
Eric Fiegehen
Cubix Corporation
Ph +1(775)888-1000
ericc@cubix.com