FAQ - Dyverso & GPUs

I can’t see any improvements in performance when I enable the GPU with DYVERSO. Why?

RealFlow’s DYVERSO solver is highly optimized for CPU multi-core and many-core processors. Some GPUs on the other hand, do not have enough computational power to outperform a 8 or 12 core processor - which is common hardware today. For this reason a GPU-based simulation can be slower than a pure CPU-based simulation.

Which GPU do you recommend for improving performance with DYVERSO?

We have observed that the number of GPU cores makes the difference. As a simple rule we can say: the more GPU cores, the better. A simulation with a Nvidia Quadro K6000 (2880 cores) is about 3x faster than an Intel Core i7-3930K, for example.

In some DYVERSO scenes I observe an increased simulation speed with the GPU enabled, but others don’t perform better. Why?

Only the fluid solver is GPU-accelerated, but some processes, e.g. fluid-object collision, are entirely calculated by the CPU. In scenes with many collision objects and other, computationally expensive elements, you might not see a boost in performance by enabling the GPU. These limitations will be removed in future versions of RealFlow where the simulation pipeline will be executed entirely on the GPU.