Question xeons and multiple gpus

[FABZ01]

can xeons read and use multiple gpus for 3D rendering? if I had a build with 2 xeons and 4 gpus would it use all four cards when rendering out of a you render engine?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Depends on the video cards.
In general, yes.
You could buy 4 gpus and sli or crossfire them assuming the cards support 4 way crossfire or sli.
It would help if your xeon had a ton of pcie lanes.

 

[FABZ01]

thanks for the reply, I currently have a xeon build but want to upgrade. wasn't sure if I should just build a new pc with an i9 and the gpus or drop a 2nd xeon in the current build and the gpus

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Multi-gpu scaling is pretty poor.
You would have to go with quadros for more than 2 way sli i think.

An i9 9900k is pretty darn powerfull.

 

[FABZ01]

Depends on the video cards.
In general, yes.
You could buy 4 gpus and sli or crossfire them assuming the cards support 4 way crossfire or sli.
It would help if your xeon had a ton of pcie lanes.

Thanks, I was thinking of getting the rtx 2080. current cpu is the xeon e5 2650

 

[InvalidError]

Multi-gpu scaling is pretty poor.

Multi-GPU scaling in GPGPU workloads is almost linear provided the host-side software can keep up with multiple GPUs and does a decent job partitioning the task between GPUs. As for SLI, most good rendering software directly support multi-GPU and perform better without the additional SLI/CF hardware abstraction overhead, which is why SLI/CF support is slowly getting phased out in favor of explicit multi-GPU.

 

[FABZ01]

Multi-GPU scaling in GPGPU workloads is almost linear provided the host-side software can keep up with multiple GPUs and does a decent job partitioning the task between GPUs. As for SLI, most good rendering software directly support multi-GPU and perform better without the additional SLI/CF hardware abstraction overhead, which is why SLI/CF support is slowly getting phased out in favor of explicit multi-GPU.

Thanks for the reply, so let's say I have a build with 2 xeon e5 2690 and 4 rtx 2080s and I render a 3D animation with a GPU render engine (octane, redshift), the render engines will pick up the 4 cards and use all cards to complete the job? and you're saying they don't need to be SLI/CF for the software to pick up the multi gpus?

 

[InvalidError]

Software with explicit multi-GPU support usually works best WITHOUT SLI since this eliminates driver guesswork (which is rarely anywhere near optimal and sometimes worse than single-GPU) from the equation.

As for what performance looks like...

GeForce RTX 2080 Multi-GPU Scaling in OctaneRender and Redshift

We found previously that stacking multiple RTX 2080 video cards next to each other for multi-GPU rendering led to overheating and significant performance throttling, due to the dual-fan cooler NVIDIA has adopted as the standard on this generation of Founders Edition cards. Now that manufacturers...

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