Light Linking on GPU plans

[f.ribbeck]

Hi,

I was just wondering if there are any rough time plans to when light linking on the GPU will be supported with C4DtoA. I am thinking about purchasing one of the new NVIDIA cards that will be released soon because of their brute speed - but without the light linking I can't really use GPU rendering on Arnold efficiently yet. Is there any timeframe for it to be likely implemented?

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

Unfortunately I can not give you any ETA or timeframe. All I can say it's actively worked on.

[f.ribbeck]

Okay, I think I might just wait until the GPU linking is fixed to buy the graphics card 🙂

[DeclanRussell]

Hey Fynn, We just added light linking support for the GPU in 6.1 🙂

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5ARP/6.1.0.0

[f.ribbeck]

WOW that is amazing!!! So good to hear :)) Thanks for letting me know, I will keep my eye out for that sweet 3090 then !

[f.ribbeck]

Will the limitation of the unsupported volumes on GPU also go away in near future or is that not clear yet?

[DeclanRussell]

Not clear yet. Is light linking for volumes important for you?

[f.ribbeck]

It's not massively important, but for example I like to light clouds seperately with a light that only affects the volumes and nothing else or when using smoke particle sims I tend to emphasize the shape of these by placing lights from different sides that only include the volumes. But I guess by setting all light contribution to none except for the volume contribution I could probably achieve a similar effct.

In general with lots of volumes in the scene I have noticed that the CPU is much faster for me to get first frame.

For me it would just be nice not to think about limitations when building a scene, as this is basically the last day-to-day noticable limitation - I feel it would make the whole GPU system more complete when lifted.

But as I said, it is not an enormous limitation and I am still superhappy that GPU light linking works for the most part for now

[DeclanRussell]

Thanks for your explanation. I've added your comments to our internal ticket #9947 we have to tackle this. I couldn't agree more that this is a limitation you shouldn't have to worry about. Rest assured that its not that we wont do it, but there is lots to do so we need to prioritize things in the right order. So your comments, and others will help us do this. 🙂

As for the GPU volume time to first pixel. We're also working on stuff to improve this.

[f.ribbeck]

Thanks 🙂 I completely agree with you, for me there are also much more important things, like the node implementation