This can work with IRay?

Imago

Today I found this video:

They say it has lots and lots of Tensor Core Units, the same IRay uses in the RTX GPUs... So, it can be used to improve rendering times?

It surely will cost way less than six RTX 3090 Super to have same amount of TPUs.

Mark_e593e0a5

simple speaking: NO

Iray requires an NVidia GPU, as IRay is an NVidia product. You can render on the CPU of your computer, bbut that is extremely slow. An AMD radeon GPU also has lots of tensor cores, but cannot be used for rendering. Perhaps that card can be used for dForce, if there is an OpenCL driver available.

Drip

The Tensor Cores in an NVidia GPU optimize the use of the CUDA cores for iray, they do not replace the use of CUDA cores. You still need the CUDA cores and the NVidia GPU Architecture for the optimized iray calculations themselves, which only NVidia GPUs are capable of. The iray calculations we can run on our CPU are not optimized for any specific architecture, and, being an NVidia proprietry thing, they simply never released optimization drivers for alternative cores, nor for GPU architectures developed by competitors. No drivers - no functionality.

vagans

Mark_e593e0a5 said:

 

An AMD radeon GPU also has lots of tensor cores, but cannot be used for rendering.

Note that currently only AMDs datacenter accelerators have Tensor cores, like the "MI" series GPUs. No consumer Radeon GPUs have Tensors, unlike Nvidia RTX GPUs.

AllenArt

Mark_e593e0a5 said:

simple speaking: NO

Iray requires an NVidia GPU, as IRay is an NVidia product. You can render on the CPU of your computer, bbut that is extremely slow. An AMD radeon GPU also has lots of tensor cores, but cannot be used for rendering. Perhaps that card can be used for dForce, if there is an OpenCL driver available.

Correction: an AMD Radeon can definitely be used for rendering, just not in Daz Studio with Iray. LOL. If you use Blender, I do believe it can be used in Cycles. I think. 

nonesuch00

Oh wow, this card makes me excited for non-render possibilities.

prixat

In Iray, I think the Tensor cores are used only for the Denoiser. 

vagans

prixat said:

In Iray, I think the Tensor cores are used only for the Denoiser. 

That's a good point for the OP. Tensors don't actually improve 3D rendering performance. And since none of this is real time, the perf difference between tensor cores and regular cores is irrelevant.