Is sbsbaker using CPU or GPU?

[bneall]

Hello, I'm wondering if the GPU is used by sbsbaker and sbsrender?

[mark.sneddon]

As far as I'm aware they both run on CPU, I'm not 100% on that though (I'm assuming you're talking about the Batch Tools exes). I do remember finding an issue a while back with sbsbaker crashing which I narrowed down to AMD display drivers though, now that I think about it...

Whether you can run them on a box that doesn't have a GPU (e.g a server blade) isn't something I've tried.

Do you have a little wider context to the question? Might help to get a more specific answer.

[bneall]

Yeap, I'm writing a front end and batch distribution tool and it would help to know this for a couple of reasons.

1. Knowing how the baking is accelerated so I can make decisions on how to give it best resources.
2. Knowing what hardware it uses lets me make decisions about what machines on a farm can run it.

[Cyrille Damez]

The answer is different for sbsbaker and sbsrender :

• sbsrender can render substances either on CPU or on the GPU. As far as I remember, you can choose which one you use using a command line option.
• based on which baker you actually call, sbsbaker either uses both the GPU and the CPU (for all the "from mesh" bakers), or only the GPU (for all the others). We will probably add CPU only versions of all the bakers at some point in order to allow batch-baking on GPU-less render farms, as well as faster "from mesh" bakers that also use the GPU for raytracing.

[bneall]

Thanks for the clarification!