tamte
must be missing something here
the attached scene, with no other changes just missing HDRI replaced with one of default ones ($HFS/houdini/pic/hdri/HDRIHaven_skylit_garage_2k.rat)
renders in 33s on my old 4 core laptop i7-6700HQ (H18.5.445)

smbell
I am running into a very similar situation here with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950x machine that I just built.

Rendering this simple scene with a handful of spheres and a single HDR or EXR image as an environment light takes a really long time to render. I'm talking about almost two hours using the default mantra settings. If I open the same scene at my office on an 8 year old dual Intel xeon machine which is less than half the speed, it renders in about 20 seconds. Converting the HDR image to a .rat file solves the issue on my AMD machine and it renders in 8 seconds.

I understand .rat files are better optimized, but this seems like there is an issue with AMD machines and the handling of HDR/EXR images as environment lights in Mantra.

Can anyone with an AMD machine try to render this test scene?

mark
There was a performance improvement in very recent daily builds for non-RAT textures. It was most noticeable on Windows. Please try a recent daily build.

jsmack

mark
There was a performance improvement in very recent daily builds for non-RAT textures. It was most noticeable on Windows. Please try a recent daily build.

Hey Mark,

I think this might be a different issue. We're seeing roughly performance parity between hdr/rat Envlights on Intel architecture CPU's and vastly different on AMD. Could this be due to differences in LLVM or AVX on the two architectures? This particular env map has a 'sun spot' in it with values in the 100k range.

smbell
I am running into a very similar situation here with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950x machine that I just built.

Rendering this simple scene with a handful of spheres and a single HDR or EXR image as an environment light takes a really long time to render. I'm talking about almost two hours using the default mantra settings. If I open the same scene at my office on an 8 year old dual Intel xeon machine which is less than half the speed, it renders in about 20 seconds. Converting the HDR image to a .rat file solves the issue on my AMD machine and it renders in 8 seconds.

I understand .rat files are better optimized, but this seems like there is an issue with AMD machines and the handling of HDR/EXR images as environment lights in Mantra.

Can anyone with an AMD machine try to render this test scene?

 TBF File Cache: 2 file opens (2.13 MB read)

OpenImageIO Texture statistics
  Options:  gray_to_rgb=0 flip_t=0 max_tile_channels=6
  Queries/batches :
    texture     :  0 queries in 0 batches
    texture 3d  :  0 queries in 0 batches
    shadow      :  0 queries in 0 batches
    environment :  37217109 queries in 37217109 batches
  Interpolations :
    closest  : 0
    bilinear : 0
    bicubic  : 37217109
  Average anisotropic probes : 1
  Max anisotropy in the wild : 1

OpenImageIO ImageCache statistics (shared) ver 2.0.10
  Options:  max_memory_MB=8023.0 max_open_files=512 autotile=64
            autoscanline=0 automip=0 forcefloat=0 accept_untiled=1
            accept_unmipped=1 deduplicate=1 unassociatedalpha=0
            failure_retries=0
  Images : 2 unique
    ImageInputs : 1 created, 1 current, 1 peak
    Total pixel data size of all images referenced : 6.0 MB
    Total actual file size of all images referenced : 1.6 MB
    Pixel data read : 6.0 MB
    File I/O time : 0.0s (0.0s average per thread, for 33 threads)
    File open time only : 0.0s
  Tiles: 128 created, 128 current, 128 peak
    total tile requests : 45377804
    micro-cache misses : 19148390 (42.1977%)
    main cache misses : 8 (1.76298e-05%)
    redundant reads: 0 tiles, 0 B
    Peak cache memory : 6.0 MB
  Image file statistics:
        opens   tiles    MB read   --redundant--   I/O time  res              File
  BROKEN
      2    1        8        6.0                       0.0s  1024x 512x3.f32  symmetrical_garden_1k.
  Tot:     1        8        6.0   (    0    0.0)      0.0s
  1 not tiled, 1 not MIP-mapped
  1 was constant-valued in all pixels
  Broken or invalid files: 0

18.5.525 - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16-Core Processor
.exr texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:09.86
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:10.01
	    Total CPU Time: 0:01:13.55
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:03.29
	 Peak Memory Usage: 505.19 MB

.hdr texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:17.33
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:17.46
	    Total CPU Time: 0:05:45.45
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:02.98
	 Peak Memory Usage: 516.16 MB

.rat texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:12.09
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:12.21
	    Total CPU Time: 0:02:55.49
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:03.91
	 Peak Memory Usage: 512.64 MB

H18.5.525 - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X 16-Core Processor
.exr texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:09.12
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:09.18
	    Total CPU Time: 0:01:21.28
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:05.09
	 Peak Memory Usage: 522.65 MB

.hdr texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:16.64
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:16.70
	    Total CPU Time: 0:05:14.13
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:04.89
	 Peak Memory Usage: 519.21 MB

.rat texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:11.43
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:11.54
	    Total CPU Time: 0:02:46.68
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:04.04
	 Peak Memory Usage: 510.90 MB


18.5.525  AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-Core Processor
.exr texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:14.50
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:14.56
            Total CPU Time: 0:04:32.90
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:06.07
         Peak Memory Usage: 1.21 GB

.hdr texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:17.47
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:17.54
            Total CPU Time: 0:14:53.45
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:05.86
         Peak Memory Usage: 1.22 GB

.rat texture
     Frame Wall Clock Time: 0:00:12.39
     Total Wall Clock Time: 0:00:12.45
            Total CPU Time: 0:04:04.92
      System CPU Time Only: 0:00:05.48
         Peak Memory Usage: 1.25 GB

Vanya K
Hi guys I started using Houdini Apprentice recently to learn Houdini and I don't think Mantra is working properly. I know it's known to be a slow renderer but I have pretty powerful machine here (AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16-core processor, GeForce RTX 2080 and 64 GB or RAM) and I am rendering this simple donut scene and it takes like 45 min to render with me lowering all settings down. Only thing is I added depth of field and I am using HDRI but even when I disable it it's the same pretty much. I am coming from 3DsMax and superb Vray5 so of course it will be a big difference in speed but still it should be about 50 times faster than this. Here I will share session file and you can tell me. Again I know everyone is complaining about this but at this point I feel like something is wrong on my end. I am learning Houdini for FXTD stuff and if Mantra can't handle a DONUT I better just install VRay or Octane so I can work properly. Please let me know if there is a bug or something because I don't think this should be this slow. This is a still image at 640x360 ...Imagine video sequence at HD. I don't know just trying to figure it oout.
Thanks in advance.