@dotstdy @castano Yes, offline rendering does have the time luxury of resolving texture accesses late. However, our renders do slow down a lot if the texture cache is thrashed; path tracing doesn't give us much ability to stream tiles, so the most commonly used tiles still need to fit in memory. An 8 GB cache does not thrash for most production renders I've seen.

@castano Pixar actually doesn't use PTex very much. But even with texture atlases, the biggest win by far is mipmapping textures before hand. There's no need to pull tiles from a 4k by 4k texture if the asset is only tens of pixels on screen. (And PTex is mipmapped.)

With only one frame to worry about, there's only so many assets that can possibly end up being hero-sized on screen. Mipmapping rules the day, and even if every asset is overmodeled and overtextured, in practice very few of their 4k textures will actually be loaded for the single frame.

Call of Duty's 320 GB textures or whatever crazy number isn't an issue for us in offline - at least until we start writing shot renderers.

(2/2)

After our XPU talk, a thing that came up often at HPG was surprise that textures aren't the biggest consumer of RAM in offline rendering, and therefore aren't the biggest concern on the GPU. Geometry is our bigger problem. Nearly all Pixar scenes are fine with a maximum 8 GB cache of uncompressed, fully 32 bit textures.

I think the tendency is to forget that for now, offline is still very much one frame at a time. (1/2)

@makram yes, definitely. I’m not sure anyone’s actually tested that yet though.

Our HPG paper on our next generation renderer RenderMan XPU is now available online: https://diglib.eg.org/bitstream/handle/10.1111/cgf70218/cgf70218.pdf

@0xabad1dea the problem with latex jokes is that you have to say them twice so that the references make sense

"A Drop Of Corruption", the sequel to "The Tainted Cup", is almost better than the first.So much squelch and ick and yuck and murder and fun.

Our paper: "RenderMan XPU: A hybrid CPU+GPU renderer for interactive and final-frame rendering" was accepted for the High-Performance Graphics (HPG) 2025 conference. Per Christensen and I will be in Copenhagen on Monday, June 23rd to present the paper on behalf of all authors.
https://highperformancegraphics.org/2025/program/schedule/
#rendering

Oh Mary! is the most batshit crazy and funny play I have ever seen.

ai;dr

i hope the nvidia driver doesn't crash

In Pixar's Coco we learned that the souls of the dead vanish if the person is forgotten. This imply souls are reference counted.

First thousand crossword streak!

Discovery - Gator Days

C’mon smoked pork shoulder, stop stalling! Dinner is in an hour 😬

My cartoon for this week's @newscientist.com

"Wait," the American representative said.

The rest of the Human trade delegation groaned.

"With this deal, the Galactic Empire get all our entertainment, and we get all their technology."

"Yes?"

"Is that fair? We have, like, thousands of films!"

"They have spaceships."

"That's one thing!"

#MicroFiction #TootFic #vss #SmallStories

#Conway #GameOfLife

I voted!

I think this is my first vote ever in a Canadian election. Seemed appropriate.