Hello guys,

the latest drivers are horrendous, i get no shadows in openGL and frankly speaking i am extremely dispointed to have a gk110 chipset that can only run games.
I really don't like what nvidia does with it's drivers, knowing that if they wanted they could easily include drivers that would make the titan perform amazingly in 3D apps.
i feel the quadro 4000 at work out performs my gtx titan viewport wise, while i didn't have that feeling with my old gtx 580 3GB

So if you consider buying a titan think twice or be patient, i am deeply starting to regret my choice, i feel i got fooled buy the 6GB chipset. and in return i got a downgraded card.

I really hope that this is a driver issue and that it will be fixed.

if anyone has an advice on what i can do plz do

thank you

Sam

The missing shadows issue appears to be a general Nvidia 320 driver problem. I can reproduce it on a GEForce 690 (also area and env lights in HQ lighting mode cause the entire scene to go black). No shaders are failing to compile so I'll have to take a closer look.

Nvidia drivers since the 300 series debuted seem to be more restless than usual, and I'm hoping that this latest problem is just due to the beta status of the driver.

thanks twod

i understand what nvidia is trying to do, but for a card like titan they should be a bit more generous driver wise, and probably do special drivers for it.

I hope titan gets better opencl drivers, but I think only time will tell

What someone (if not Nvidia, but this won't happen obviously) should do is to crack drivers to allow it to run quadro mode on gforce cards, without modifying card itself (thought recently looks like they succeed again with 660 to K5000 update [eevblog.com].)

People should have a choice to run high performance game driver, or slower but stable professional driver, even if this would lower the actual performance compared to real quadros. So gforces in “quadro mode” could run slower, but still more stable than game cards.

I doubt this could ever happen from nvidia side, but people love to break thing, don't they, and if changing 660 to K5000 is a matter if two transistors… well.

I've looked into this and I'm not sure we can do anything on our end. The shadowmap is created correctly, the inputs to the shader are correct, but the output is either all shadowed or all not in shadow, depending on the debugging tweaks I make to the shader. So something is definitely amiss with 320.

The GEForce 780 is supposed to debut in a few days, perhaps an non-beta 320 driver will be available then that might resolve the problem. The 780 is based on the same GK110 GPU as the Titan, though with fewer cores active. (The 770 will debut then as well, but it's essentially the same GPU as the 680).

I did manage to find a workaround for this, and it is in 12.5.412. I will still be talking with Nvidia about the driver change that broke HQ Lighting/Shadows, as it seems highly questionable.

oh ok so when my scene is all black it isn't cause geometry is gone but it is because everything is shadowed..good to know

thanks twod i ll install the build after i finish some render
i ll give feedback in a bit


edit: just realised that the 412 build isn't out yet

It wasn't just shadow, really. Shared uniform blocks were no longer reporting member uniforms that were not used by the shader they were created in, so when a different shader used the uniform block, these other uniforms would remain uninitialized. This resulted in general chaos - sometimes black, sometimes NaNs, sometimes just missing shadows.

The previous drivers (and AMD drivers) reported all uniform block members when queried, whether they were used by the shader or not, so this was not an issue. I adjusted our code a bit to ensure that a uniform block would be checked against the new shader's layout of the block, so these missing uniforms would be added to the block's structure definition, and updated properly.

Sort of like defensive driving, except for GL drivers

So is it really worth to buy a titan now?
I`m mostly going to use it for Houdini/Maya, but from many places there is a complaints about drivers and that nvidia tend to push their quadros by destroying support of 3d packages by 600 gtx series, then probably 700 series also. In this case quadro will be way better, since you know that everything will work as it should. However who don't like to play a bit after long working day? And all of us know that quadros is a crap for games.
I can`t find any information about installing quadro and gtx on the same pc, to make them work together. SO the quadro will handle viewport only and gtx will do the simulations/rendering, but when it`s time to play- I can switch to gtx and get fun. Any ideas?

I did a small performance test for the viewport. I copied a torus 200 rows by 200 colums onto a grid, 20 by 20 which gives you 16 million polygons. If you rotate this and check the fps (displayoptions/guides tab) you get somthing realistic to compare. A GTX 480 gives you about 4 fps, a GTX 580 about 5 fps(i7 980x @4.2Ghz). It would be really interresting to know how the GTX Titian performs as I am also planning to upgrade my system (or downgrade???). Judging by all these artificial benchmarks the Titan should give you at least about 10 fps. If they manage to fix that shadow issue (which I truely hope for people who allready bought it) this would be a nice card to own.

To miklem:
Do not try an install a Quadro along with a GTX as the drivers can not be installed alongside. We made this painfull experince on a workstation with 6 x GTX 480's for rendering in 3ds Max and wanted to install a Quadro 5000 for the viewport performance. The Quadro drivers simply uninstall the GTX ones and there is nothing you can do about that . The Quadros install -thanks to the wisdom of Nvidia - only alongside with Tesla cards.

Hope this helps,
Bernd

Thank you for response. Really annoying situation which is here just because Huang is too greedy. Okay then, will the titan work correctly in houdini/maya? On the autodesk site, I saw that GTX 690, which is the consumer card, is one of the certified and recommended cards for the maya. So it means that all the features, like viewport 2.0 and so on should work properly. The titan is hiend card also, so there is a hope that it will be recommended and certified too. Would be really nice if the real owners of titan will do a tests, and especially this one http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=25234&highlight=OpenCl [sidefx.com]

misterluqman right on the spot

miklem i ran some test on my machine

2*xeon 3.07ghz hexacore
GTX titan
48 GB ram

356^3 : 980ms
256^3 : 450 ms

Hi

So might be a dumb question but I'm wondering K5000 quadro or Titan for GPU update - I guess Titan not a good move?

So might be a dumb question but I'm wondering K5000 quadro or Titan for GPU update - I guess Titan not a good move?

Well…. Nvidia has sent us all of its Quadro K series for testing, and also a GEForce GTX690. However, we have not received a Titan, nor any other GEForce cards for testing. So I'm not sure what Nvidia intends for the Titan.

However if you are considering the Titan despite this, the GEForce 780 is based on the same GPU and is a bit cheaper, offering ~90% of the shading power and 1/2 the memory of the Titan.

Right - good to know thank you

right now, the only thing that speaks for titan is 6gb ram, regarding opencl speed it seems to perform far below it's possibilities. it is not slow but I expected more

I guess Houdini uses single precision calculations for everything? If so, then the titan isn't so useful unless you doing huge sims and need a lot of vram. I think I'll stick to the 780.

I believe all our OpenCL-acceleration is single precision. Double precision takes a moderate-to-huge hit on most graphics cards. Considering how most Nvidia cards seem to perform OpenCL tasks, this is probably a good thing :?