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Rendernode performance

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Arthur van Rooijen

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  • Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 10:56 am

Rendernode performance

PostWed Nov 30, 2022 1:35 pm

Dear all,

We have been using Fusion to generate small, personalized videos since 2015. Until now we used 2 dedicated servers with Rendernode Version 7.7.1. This has been working great and even still does.

Now we must move to a different computer centre where we must use virtual machines. We are now moving to a Proliant DL380 Gen10 with VMware ESXi, 7.0.3 where we have 2 VM’s with 8 vCPU’s and 32 GB Memory. Because a of the “GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM which supports Metal, OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 10” Requirement we added a NVIDIA GRID T4-4Q to the server. We are running Windows Server 2019 Version 10.0.17763 Build 17763

Because Rendernode 7.7.1 is very old, I decided to upgrade to v17.4.5.
Everything did run smoothly but I noticed a rather big performance degradation. I decided to also install version 7 again and do a back-to-back comparison with a small composition. Here are the results:
Rendernode Version 17
Render completed successfully at Wed 8:48AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 18.49s, Average: 4.97 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 8:49AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 18.12s, Average: 5.08 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 8:50AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 20.25s, Average: 4.54 frames/second


Rendernode Version 7
Render completed successfully at Wed 8:55AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 10.35s, Average: 8.89 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 8:56AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 10.41s, Average: 8.84 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 8:57AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 10.47s, Average: 8.79 frames/second

As you can see version 17 is about 40% slower

This morning I tried with the latest version 18.1.1 with similar results
Render completed successfully at Wed 10:38AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 15.01s, Average: 6.13 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 10:43AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 16.97s, Average: 5.42 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 10:46AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 14.40s, Average: 6.39 frames/second

Although a little quicker not as fast as version 7.

As I tested version 7 I noticed in the performance monitor that the GPU was hardly used at all. So I decided to test version 18 with GPU Options set to CPU and I got almost the same results as with version 7
Render completed successfully at Wed 10:48AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 10.54s, Average: 8.73 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 10:49AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 10.75s, Average: 8.56 frames/second
Render completed successfully at Wed 10:50AM - Total Time: 0h 0m 11.54s, Average: 7.97 frames/second


That irritates me, did we buy that expensive NVIDIA Grid Card for nothing?

I hope somebody can help me sort this out:
  1. Has someone experience with a VM and the NVIDEA Grid card?
  2. Might Windows Server 2019 be the problem?
  3. Due to the production-chain we use, we use *.tga input and *,tga output. I also tried with mp4 for input and output but still the CPU Option is quicker as the Auto or GPU option.
  4. We mostly use only simple Text and tracking nodes in our composition. This might not be optimal for GPU rendering. But if I set GPU option to CPU I will not be able to use the GPU if we are going to use 3D rendering in the future. And we are wasting an expensive graphic card.
  5. Are there any other settings I can try to improve performance?

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