Topic: Does Lumion work with Nvidia Visual Computing Appliance?

[josh.moore2911]

Hello, I'm trying to determine if Lumion could work with an Nvidia Computing Appliance.  Are there any white papers or case studies of this working?  If not, is there any ways to "virtualize" the usage.  We are a large architectural firm and are trying to determine if we can tap into a VCA from laptops that don't have high end graphics cards.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/visual-computing-appliance.html

Thank you,

Josh

[peterm]

Hi Josh

Thanks you for your enquiry.

Lumion requires access to the local GPU to work, so the virtualization required to run an Nvidia Quadro Computing Appliance arrangement is (AFAIK) unlikely to work.

Although not exactly the same configuration, the question has also been asked about NVIDIA Grid; refer XenDesktop 7.5 - Nvidia GRID vGPU support statement.

I'll ask the developers if they wish to comment further.

[peterm]

Hi Josh

One of our developers has confirmed it's not going to work with Lumion, and commented that:

Vca only works with 3 rendering systems that offload raytracing to the system. It does not do any real time rendering in the way a gpu normally does. It does not support OpenGL or DirectX for example.

..The LAN simply lacks the bandwidth. Try comparing the bandwidth of the GFX card an the PC
..Functionally it's essentially the same concept as a render farm... and only solves the raytracing.

Apparently it could cost around 50k for an 8 card setup.  That could buy a lot of PC's with Titan X's