Following our recent tests on a machine with 4x nvidia maxwell series GPUs we tested Arion renderer with 3 more cards plugged in.
Our machine run Windows 7 x64. To test the rendering speed and scalability of Arion we used ArionBench downloaded from rendomcontrol.com
Running the benchmark test on 7x 970 GPUs gave a result of 8785,03 points. Compared to 5312 that our system with 4 GPUs scored it is quite ok. It shows that scalability is not the issue with Arion – rendering with 7 GPUs should be around 6,6 times faster than using only one graphic card. Adding CPUs’ power gave no additional boost, in fact it slowed down the rendering about 5%.
However we still have the feeling that RandomControl’s Arion does not fully utilize nvidia’s newest Maxwell and its predecessor Kepler architecture. There are no significant differences in terms of speed comparing to old Fermi gpus. Will have to check ArionBench on some of those to confirm.
Running Arion on multiple GPUs system configuration is highly recommended.
Time will tell if this changes.