Spending More

“What do I get if I spend more?”

This question comes up quite frequently when I’m speaking with customers, especially if they are considering upgrading from an older computer. I believe most people are referring to “more” performance, but that’s not always the case.

OctaneBench 2019 Performance Preview

OTOY is nearing completion of OctaneBench 2019, the first version of their OctaneRender benchmark to support the new RTX technology in NVIDIA’s Turing-based GeForce and Quadro video cards. We will do a full performance roundup when OB 2019 is finished, but for now I wanted to put out a quick preview of the performance increase that RTX tech can bring to GPU rendering.

NVIDIA RTX Graphics Card Cooling Issues

With the RTX series of GPUs, NVIDIA has moved to using dual fans as the standard cooling layout on their GeForce and Titan video cards. This is a big change from past generations and has even bigger implications for using NVIDIA graphics cards in multi-GPU workstations. Let’s look at what changed, what it impacts, and what can be done to work around it.

Not Just for Gaming: NVIDIA GeForce RTX Will Improve Workflows

NVIDIAs new GeForce RTX video cards have been all the talk lately. There is a lot of debate on the value that real time ray tracing brings to games, and some questions on how useful these cards will be to traditional ray traced renderers. With these cards becoming available for testing, and reviews starting to come in, many of these questions will be answered. However, there is an aspect to these cards that is often being overlooked: how the advances in real time ray tracing will dramatically cut down on production time before the rendering stage.

A quick look at Titan V rendering performance

The latest in the Titan line is here, bringing along with it a very hefty price tag. We just got our first cards in and while we will be doing more in-depth testing in the near future, we wanted to take a look at some preliminary GPU-based rendering results.

NVIDIA Titan V Surprise

NVIDIA’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, dropped a bit of a bombshell at the NIPS conference yesterday: the launch – and immediate availability – of the next graphics card in NVIDIA’s Titan series. It is called the Titan V, with V referring to the new Volta architecture it is based on. So what can we expect from the latest entry in the Titan lineup?

In Search of Competition

While speaking to our customers, I’m often asked why we don’t carry a specific brand or type of product. For example, AMD recently released a CPU called Ryzen that competes with Intel CPUs. AMD is positioning these chips as comparable to Intel’s offerings but at a lower price. Some customers are interested in how these new chips stack up.

Visiting Supercomputing 2016

I made the trek to Salt Lake City to attend the Supercomputing conference. I’ve attended conferences both large and small going back 20 years, but nothing could prepare me for what I saw at Supercomputing. If you’re not familiar with Supercomputing, it’s an annual conference where scientists, researchers, and engineers gather to discuss high-performance computing, network storage and related technologies.