Deadline worker running as service with GPU access

Development Rendering
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1

Hello,

I’m encountering an issue where my Deadline workers, which are running as a service, are denied GPU access. This causes my Unreal Engine MRQ renders to fail, because my project specifically uses Path Tracing and requires the GPU.

From what I understand, this is a security feature on Windows that isolates services from accessing graphics hardware. I would prefer to keep the workers running as a service for our farm setup.

Has anyone found a workaround that allows a Deadline worker running as a service to have access to the GPU for Unreal?

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Steps to Reproduce

  1. Setup Deadline render farm where workers run as a service.
  2. Setup Unreal project that renders specifically using and GPU PT.
  3. Submit Render Job to render farm using a remote submitter.
3

Hey Tucker,

No, I asked a few teams here internally, and unfortunately, there is no workaround that we know of internally. Our own cinematics team uses Deadline 10 and the Deadline Worker Launcher to automatically start the worker on startup. They don’t run as a service but behave like one.

What version of Windows is being used? Windows Server potentially may not enforce this isolation, given the nature of the workloads it is used for.

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Someone from the Pixel Streaming team added:

The other factor that might potentially impact this is which user account the service is configured to run as. It’s possible that running the service as a regular user account might behave differently than running it as one of the system users such as LocalSystem (which I believe is typically the default).

5

Hi Tucker,

Confirming that we’ve explored this issue as much as we can, and have found no precedent for a workaround regarding the service approach. Per your question in Zoom around CPU fallback: that doesn’t currently exist and is unlikely to become a roadmap goal. I’m closing this ticket for now, but I you wish we can discuss in-person in our upcoming pipeline review sessions.

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Hey Michael and Shaun,

Thank you, yes, I dont think there much more we can dive into for this. Session 0 Isolation prevents the service from accessing GPU / Display drivers. One of our techs had heard the only functional work-around for getting renders out of the Session 0 sandbox is to use a computation-only gpu driver. We have reached out to Nvidia to see if there is an available computation driver for the GPUs we have in our render towers or if there was another work around. Haven’t heard back yet however. But thank you for looking into this on your end!