How To Fix Your GPU Not Working At Full Potential

GPU rendering is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to speed up your rendering time and increase the realism of your images. It’s also a bit of a double-edged sword.

When you have a lot of geometry to be rendered, it may be challenging to keep up with the demand. That’s where bottlenecks come into play.

They’re also known as GPU thrills, stalls, stalls, or pace stalls. They’re short periods of time where your computer’s GPU can’t keep up with the demands of your scene.

These situations can happen for any number of reasons, but one of the most common is the lack of available memory on your system. 

Under some circumstances, this can have a cascading effect, where a seemingly unrelated bottleneck suddenly renders your entire system incapable of handling the additional load being placed upon it.

In this blog post, we’ll take you through 5 Tips on How to Overcome a GPU Bottleneck. This will help you to identify if you’re experiencing a bottleneck, and if so, what you can do to alleviate the issue.

What is a GPU Bottleneck?

A GPU bottleneck occurs when your graphics card can’t keep up with the demands of your scene. A bottleneck occurs when your system’s memory is maxed out, causing the GPU to slow down considerably.

This can be caused by a lack of GPU RAM (graphic memory), too many draw calls, or a combination of both.

How Can You Detect if Your GPU is Being Overwhelmed?

You can detect if your GPU is being overwhelmed by setting up a render test. Render tests are great for checking a rendering system’s performance. 

They simulate a large number of renders by creating many layers of renders that queue up for execution. 

This way you can see how long it takes to render a scene and the resource usage of your system.  One of the best ways to benchmark your system is to render a single scene that takes advantage of every resource on your system. 

You can use RenderDoc to monitor the performance of a rendering system while rendering a large number of tests.

Setting Up for GPU Rendering

You should always render your scenes in GPU mode, if possible. If you don’t have a GPU, then you can still use the CPU. 

Generally, if you have a modern PC, it will have both a GPU and a CPU. So you don’t have to worry about that. You have to decide whether you will render with the CPU or GPU.

 

The amount of time it takes to render a scene will depend on the kind of scene you are rendering, so it’s best to test it out. 

If your scene is memory intensive, you can try to render it with the CPU and see whether it gives you a reasonable amount of time to work on it.

Render Buffering and Pre-Processing

You should also render your scene with render buffer layers and pre-processing. 

Render buffer layers allow the GPU to fill in the gaps in your scene with the data it doesn’t have to draw yet. For example, you’re rendering a car that has two tires and a steering wheel, and there are no trees in the scene.

The car is in front of a big building that the building is behind, so the car is far away from the building and the building is far away from the car. 

That’s where we start with the scene. Now, you want to add trees in the scene. So you add trees to the scene and let’s say that there’s a lot of trees in the scene and you want to see them and you also want to see the building in the scene.

Conclusion

There are a couple of things that you can do to deal with a GPU bottleneck. First, you can render your scene in GPU mode. Secondly, you can render with render buffer layers and pre-processing. 

Once those are setup, you need to make sure you’re using all of your system’s resources. You also need to be mindful of the data that you’re using. Lastly, you can keep an eye out for potential issues.