One of the researchers here wants some hardware for a university VR project. There is actually quite a decent budget, and it has to be spent within the next week or so, but since I’ve been out the loop with graphics hardware and rendering for a few years, I’m a bit lost as to what exactly I would need here (and time is an issue)…
The Star Wars Reflections demo from last year apparently used a DGX for real time rendering, but then I thought that UE4 didn’t utilise multi-GPU setups. So whilst this has me wondering what the DGX solution used, the same thing was then rendered later on just a single RTX 2080! We actually have the option to purchase the same DGX system (4 * V100), but I am not convinced this is either necessary or appropriate for what he wants to do. Furthermore, the Mike Seymour’s “Real Time Mike” demo used just a 32 GB desktop with a single 1080ti, and those results are pretty impressive.
No matter how much money we were to throw at this, I don’t see how any NVlink/SLI/multi-GPU solution would be accomplished with UE4 as it is currently since it isn’t supported… so the question is; if you were going to have a VR scene running and wanted to be able to focus on visual realism (the real time rendering, and photorealism, is the point of it all, I think), what kind of hardware setup would you go for *if money was not the limiting factor? *(and yes, UE4 is not a limitation either - I was just inspired by the projects that have already used it!)?
The question is very open ended, but I am thinking of things such as; am I right in thinking that a single GPU is still all that UE4 can utilise? Should I just get the most expensive card available? Or should I ignore Quadros and RTX 5/6/8000 series cards in favour of an RTX 2080? Are V100s wholly inappropriate? Would a DGX for ray tracing give me any mileage or should I just focus on a good CPU?
If money is no option, currently the best you can get for UE4 is a Titan RTX
If UE4 gets NVLink added then you can improve that with multiple GPU’s, but currently the best single GPU solution is the Titan RTX
And again if money is no option, get 64GB of RAM or more, get some Xeon CPU’s and all that
Of course what you want to do on it matters so most likely you can get by with less.
As for whether it’s worth using DXR, the raytracing is faster on a GPU since it’s many small calculations which a GPU is better equipped to do, also note though that some renderers will be able to take advantage of the raytracing cores in the RTX cards, like Vray (which also supports NVLink)
So there are more uses for an RTX card out of UE4
Thanks for the heads-up re: the Titan RTX. Is a Tesla V100 or an RTX 8000 totally wasted with UE4, then?
If so, it seems there’s not any point spending more than $3k USD on the GPU, then… which would be really strange. I guess looking outside of UE4 could be the way to go, but it would be such a shame, because UE4 does - and should be able to do - everything else they would technically want to do.
As for the DGX… this is to what I was referring; essentially, its 4 V100s in a box:
My thought was… if the Reflections demo could offload their real-time raytracing to another unit, using the Unreal engine, how could someone else do the same if they had the same hardware? I see some conflicting things around which suggests that you can use SLI with UE4, but do you have to contact Nvidia for this? Is this something that could be covered by Nvidia Gameworks?
The demo was something that was set up very custom with UE4, since they didn’t have raytracing support in the engine at that time.
The Quadro/Tesla cards aren’t designed for video game graphics, they used those in the demo because the new Geforce RTX cards weren’t available yet. They actually do that a lot in many Nvidia demos where they use a Quadro card for something that would actually be cheaper and faster to do with a Geforce card, where the only advantage that using a Quadro card has is more memory. I think it’s part of them trying to promote the workstation cards.
The workstation graphics cards have some things that mostly benefit CAD software. The gaming cards are designed to focus on speed, so ultimately if you want UE4 to work its best you’d need the gaming cards.
As far as SLI goes, while UE4 can work with it, the idea is that you’re developing a game with UE4 and then you contact Nvidia to make an SLI profile for your game, it’s something that gets installed with the GPU drivers.