GPU

I'm preparing to learn Cinemachine but making sure my hardware is up to the task. Is there any advantage to using two GPUs for rendering? The idea being to render in real-time.

 

Hi Dan,

Cinemchine is a camera animation system. It's pretty light, not usually even noticeable cost-wise in most cases. I think you may be concerned with outright rendering performance. In that case yes, a beefy GPU helps a lot, especially if you need to render in realtime VS just using Recorder and outputting files.

As for dual cards, this is a good start: https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-u...00.859192238.1575578723-2128062438.1571424202

The short answer is no, dual cards won't help due to limitations around preserving framebuffers across frames such as with motion blur, TAA, SSReflections, etc., - if you want those kinds of things. From the article:

In general, if your content uses results from a previous frame, then SLI will not be faster. The best advice would be to make sure to render everything you need in the same frame. To clarify, you should not render some textures in one frame and use them in another frame. Specifically from the Image Effects package, the "motion blur" effect uses a render texture from the previous frame.

The size/complexity of your scene will make the most difference. Do you have every post processing effect cranked up? Want to do it at 4K? Have 40 million polygons in your scene? Those will be your biggest bottlenecks.

A geforce 1080 is probably the minimum to get rock solid 30fps our of a decently complex scene.. but again, a lot of variables with the scene complexity..

So I'd just get the fastest card you can and load the scene up until you approach minimum acceptable performance.

If it doesn't have to be real-time, then use Recorder and crank everything up to 11

 

Hi Adam,

Sounds good and thank you for the information. I went with the 1080Ti Duke 11GB. The idea was to render in real-time but I'm thinking that is not so important. I'm still in that stage of trying to figure out my workflow. Rendering in jpg or png sequence, and then to Da Vinci Resovle would probably work just fine. I will need to do some testing soon to see how all of this comes together.

So probably very high detail scenes but very small scenes that load up as needed. I want the same quality of Adam, or similar, and I think they recorded in 60fps. However, to distribute to Amazon Prime Video I will need to encode in 30 or 24 so again I better test early and often I think to see how this works.

Thanks again!
Dan

 

Hi Dan,

We render at 24 or 30 fps from Recorder. A good trick is to also export at 4K (or larger) and downsize to HD or whatever to get that last bit of quality/smoothing which the downsample gives. For most of our projects we load the Recorder outputted frames into Davinci Resolve for the 'Smooth' downsample + merge with audio then export to whatever format you want. Resolve is amazing for this and it's FREE if your output needed is only 1920.

 

Hi Adam,

Exporting at 4K and downsize to HD is probably the way to go. I am running a 4K export now but I was thinking that I would have a final render in 4K. I didn't realize Da Vanci Resolve (free version) had that limitation.

I experimented with capturing in 60fps (like they did with Adam), and encoding in 30fps. LOL, I learned about slow motion but it did leave me somewhat confused because Amazon shows that is possible. I likely did something wrong.

So I think I will follow your tip. Export in 4K 30fps, downsize to 1920 x 1080 HD, cut in Da Vinci Resolve. Add in sound in Da Vinci. I will also run a test in 24fps to see how that looks. I'm not using Unity's Video Recorder but AVPro Movie Capture. It seems to have more options.

Headed to work now but thanks for the help. I appreciate it.