Minning hardware for IRAY?

MrReclusive

So I have been thinking of ways to expand my rendering setup, i am working on a project (personal, hopefully eventualy turn into something i can sell, btw IRAY renders in VR look amazing), with some tricks I have learned over the years I have been able to get 75% of the renders I am doing down to less then 10 minutes on a 1070+980 setup. in some cases rendering a 1080p image in less then 2 min. their is still the 25% of the renders that are 30 minutes to over an hour. I have recently expanded this project to include animated video.. in vr. so.. each video, rendered twice at 30fps. these 5 second animations take weeks to render.

I want to get those 75% of renders down to pretty much real time. and the multi week animation renders down to a couple of days.

and don't know why i didin't think of this earlier.

Their is allot of hardware built for minning machines, most specificly, PCIe Riser cards.

has anyone tested this sort of setup with IRAY? I know this works well with minning because their dosn't need to be massive amounts of data transfered between the cpu and gpu's, your basicly just tapping into the gpu and its doing the work. doees iray work close to the same. my assumption is, the cpu compiles all the required information and sends it allong with textures to the gpu, and the gpu just sends data back every few ms with what it has "rendered".

I am looking at things like these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABMK6K45522&cm_re=pcie_riser-_-17Z-00CS-00002-_-Product

and maybe after i do a little more research, things like these. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABMK67S9034&cm_re=pcie_riser-_-9SIABMK67S9034-_-Product

The obvious problem I have right now, is you can only add so manny GPU's inside a case, and their is always the heat problem. and the first option would allow me to add 6 external gpu's my system as it is right now. The second would allow me to add 8 (leaving primary gpu in case) and with a custom build with a motherboard with intergrated graphics/APU, I could add 16. <--thats going to get expensive, but i could build up slowly using openbox/refurbs.

Also, anyone know if wattage requirments for gpu's stay the same if they are just being used for iray/cuda. or could i run 8 gpu's on a dedicated 1200 watt psu.

Thanks for any input.

Richard Haseltine

I am aware of people using eGPU enclosures for Iray, though the ideal GPU is not necessarily the same as for mining - memory being less of an issue with mining.

MrReclusive

Right and i get that, which is why im looking at building up a decent amount of 1080's/1070's. and for mining (opencl) AMD cards are far superior.

anyword on how the performance is with eGPU and the various ways of connecting? Thunderbolt (40GBs)/USB(10GBs). has anyone done a test with the same card internal vs external specificily for cuda/iray operations?

I dont know to much about the communication that goes on between the GPU and CPU during an IRAY render.

I know when rendering their is nothing going on with HDD, but CPU is always at about 50% even though I am only using the gpu's for rendering.