Free Trial for NVIDIA Iray Server Goes Online

Concept material created with Substance Designer and rendered with Iray. Image courtesy of Chaotic Atmospheres.

Since rendering often brings some of the most powerful workstations to a grinding halt, it’s perfect for distributed computing. But the difficulty to teach a number of machines to work together like a single giant computer—a cluster—is not to be underestimated. It takes expertise in both the rendering software and IT setup. With the launch of its 90-day free trial of Iray Server, GPU maker NVIDIA plans to show it’s easier than you might think to render on a cluster.

Announcing the trial in a blog post, NVIDIA writes, “Available for a free 90-day trial starting today, Iray Server coordinates a network of machines as a cluster to speed the creation of images. It runs on the hardware of your choice. And you can use it with any NVIDIA Iray physically based rendering product—like our plug-ins for Autodesk 3dsMax and Maya or software products that use Iray—without any overhead of the host application.”

The use of photo-realistic renderings for design evaluation is prevalent in automotive, consumer goods, and architecture, where constructing a physical prototype could be cost-prohibitive. Iray Server is a software solution to address these markets. NVIDIA writes, “All machines running Iray Server coordinate with each other to reduce the time needed to render an image. This allows a render farm to process poster-size images in a fraction of the time of a single machine. A central management console also gives flexible control over submitted jobs with the ability to adjust and rerun past jobs.”

Some in the entertainment, media, design, and engineering professions simply want to cut down the time required to produce rendered images. Others want to take it a step further. They’d like to work with fully rendered 3D scenes, assemblies, and building models in an interactive mode, with instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) visual feedback to the changes they make on their designs. With finite processing power and memory, a workstation may not provide adequate computing capacity to accommodate such a way of working. However, offloading the rendering to a remote cluster and streaming the results to the local machine could be the solution.

NVIDIA points out, “You can stream interactive rendering from Iray Server to another machine, allowing a laptop to have multi-GPU power.”