localstarlight

I'm probably missing something really obvious here, but when I click 'Render to Disk' in Karma/Solaris, there doesn't appear to be any feedback whatsoever: no windows pops up showing progress, there's no command-line type output I can follow the rendering on, nothing. In fact, the only way I can know anything is happening at all is by opening the task manager and seeing if husk.exe is running and doing anything.

This is the kind of behaviour I would expect from a button saying 'Render to Disk in Background', but not from 'Render to Disk'. Is there an output log/progress bar that I need to enable somehow?

We've just finished a very high resolution project (24K x 12K) using Redshift in standard Houdini. We are now investigating starting to move to Solaris/USD and whether we can use Karma instead of Redshift.

I'm running some very basic tests and already hitting an issue with even attempting to render at that resolution, as well as significantly slower render times. I'm testing a very basic scene:

- HDRI dome light
- spherical camera
- various resolutions (4K, 8K, 12K, 24K)

My benchmarks (on a 4080 super) for this scene using Redshift in a standard (non-Solaris) way are as follows:

4K
- 1.7 seconds

8K
- 5.5 seconds

12K
- 9.3 seconds

24K
- 38.3 seconds

Using KarmaXPU in Solaris:

4K
- 6 seconds

8K
- 25 seconds

12K
- 51 seconds

24K
- WON'T RENDER

First up, I'm surprised that there is such a difference in render time with such a simple scene. This is just with one primary sample on Karma, but perhaps I'm missing some really obvious render settings which should bring this down. But no matter what I try, trying to render 24K just totally crashes every time. Is there just a hard resolution limit with Karma?

Ah yes, I should have mentioned that the whole intention here is to use Karma XPU as a replacement for Redshift. We’re not in a position to switch to a CPU renderer. Thanks anyway though.