Nvidia SLI for flame?

[pgill]

has anyone ever tried getting SLI working with Flame for added performance?

paul

[Saran Sirikasamsap]

does the flame software support SLI ?

[Ramazan]

Exactly, does it? I know some Linux distros support it so can we do it in the autodesk rh distro and will flame see the benefits?

[Saran Sirikasamsap]

@pgill 29407 wrote:

Exactly, does it? I know some Linux distros support it so can we do it in the autodesk rh distro and will flame see the benefits?

doesnt that involve changing the nvidia card ? to a dual GPU ? i vaguely remember reading somewhere that sli under RHEL requires 2 GPUS on one board not 2 cards strapped together ? but i may be totally wrong about that.>>

i think toxik would take advantage of SLI?..

interesting reading = http://linux-hybrid-graphics.blogspot.com/

[Ramazan]

I was looking at the quadro plex which has 4x fx5800 boards.
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/product_quadroplex_2200_s4_uk.html

Also I have a cheap fx4500x2 lying around which is 2 4500’s strapped together but on one board! This probably won’t match the performance of the 5600 anyway but would be interesting to try to see if it would work.
If the plexi works that would be amazing!

[Shannon Gans]

@pgill 29397 wrote:

has anyone ever tried getting SLI working with Flame for added performance?

paul

Hi Paul,

Interesting thoughts…

Here are some comments:

As far as I know, SLI is more down to the nvidia driver, so currently Autodesk dont support the SLI driver.

You cannot connect a gsync card or SDI option to an SLI based system, so the graphics will not be genlocked.

With the Z800, there is only one PCIe2 slot, so you would have to downgrade to a standard PCIe x 16 speed if you put two cards in a Z800. I suspect that’s not really what you want to do!

Looking at quadraplex.

You can genlock it for the 2 x fx5800 version, but there is no SDI support. The full 4 x FX5800 doesn’t support genlock.
The interface is PCIe, but it doesn’t say if it’s PCIe2 compatible, so there could be a performance hit as it’s not as fast as a single FX5800 which is PCIe2 compatible.

Talking of performance, how are you going to feed the quadraplex the data it wants/requires?
It’s only a single PCIe slot feeding upto 4 PCIe2 cards? So that single link maybe a bottle neck.

The only PCIe2 slot is taken by the graphics (quadraplex/FX5800), and the Atto card is in a PCIe x16 slot so a single card cannot feed enough data to the PCIe2 slot. So we need to think about using 2 x Atto cards, with enough fast enough disks and a fast enough filesystem to flood both cards/PCIe slots.

With Smoke/Mac, Autodesk use the AJA card for preview. In the past this has been done via software readback, which has/had a performance hit which is shown by a delay between the UI and broadcast monitor (remember the octane2 without DCD/DM5). The quick look at the Smoke/Mac did not seem to suffer this, so it’s possible to preview without an SDI option.

What could be interesting is GPU burn on a quadraplex/SLI based system as the requirements from Autodesk are greatly reduced. The case for getting the data to the system is still there and I suspect a san solution would be the logical solution.

Chris

[Author]

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