Swarm Agent On GPU?

[Ad-man]

Hello,

Recently the map Im currently working on has been taking longer and longer to build even to preview (understandable, considering the amount of lights and lightmap resolutions) but it is quite an issue for me to do this as it is taking up to a good 20-30 minutes for me now. This is because my CPU is lacking a bit for processes like this, but I do have a powerful Nvidia GTX 670, and was wondering if there is a way I could run Swarm Agent through my GPU as opposed to my CPU, which Im sure can process ridiculously faster.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
~Adam

[JessieG]

I don't believe that's possible to do without modifying the engine (which you can't do with UDK). 20-30 minutes isn't bad at all if its a full scene. I've had stuff that took hours and hours to build lights. And this was when my CPU was top of the line (3700K i7 only about a week after it came out).

My only advice to you is to rely on the preview lighting for a while and when it seems like it may be a good result, build the lights when you're done working for the day so when you come back to it later you can see the results right away. Make a note of what you want to change when you start working again and then continue working with your meshes in the scene. Once you're done for that day, make the changes to the lights and build before stopping your work. Rinse repeat. This way you can add to the scene and still update your lighting without finishing the scene first then literally just waiting while lights bake.

I tend to do my lightbaking almost exclusively overnight while i sleep. If you try to lower settings/quality just to speed it up you'll get some bad lighting, and in turn, get even more frustrated with the system. Doing it overnight allows me to focus on mesh placement and laying out my scene for most of the day, yet still get the benefits of seeing my full production lighting every time i start working to accurately asses what changes i want to make. I never save my lighting for last this way so I see the overall progress much better.

Honestly I think a majority of the time I'll set up basic lighting without worrying about the settings and work in unlit mode most of the time. I only ever switch to game mode to view the effects of a bake the morning after starting one when I finally start messing with the lighting setup. I'll write down what I need to change for the lights, switch to unlit mode, and continue working with the meshes, kismet, etc. then before stopping for the day I'll make the changes to the lights and start a build.

[DGX]

No, swarm does not support GPU computing.

To reduce light build time properly use LightmassImportanceVolumes, optimize lightning (e.g. reduce resolution or disable lightmaps in places not seen by player). Another solution is to use only Dynamic lightning, but this may not fit your project.

[darthviper107]

It wouldn't be terribly useful---GPU's don't have much memory, like the GTX 670 is only 2GB or 4GB which isn't that much compared to what the system is capable of, and if it your map doesn't fit everything in the memory then it wouldn't be able to use the GPU at all. So really the only stuff that could use GPU rendering wouldn't be very complex maps and if that would be the case then it would be rendering within a reasonable amount of time anyways.

[Ad-man]

Thanks for all the responses, and 2GB ram is enough for the map so if it did support it I couldve done it, but I guess I cant. I have it all optimized and stuff, its just a lot of lights that cause the slowdown in build time.

Thanks everyone!
~Adam

[vipar]

It wouldn't be terribly useful---GPU's don't have much memory, like the GTX 670 is only 2GB or 4GB which isn't that much compared to what the system is capable of, and if it your map doesn't fit everything in the memory then it wouldn't be able to use the GPU at all. So really the only stuff that could use GPU rendering wouldn't be very complex maps and if that would be the case then it would be rendering within a reasonable amount of time anyways.

GPUs got amazing number crunchers though.
You wouldn't have to feed all data to the GPU at the same time, if you could do it partially.

In theory it would be able to do it many times faster than your CPU.

[darthviper107]

Rendering has to load everything into the memory at once since the lighting can effect all items.