A personal project where I tested Karma XPU with extended ocean setup inside Houdini 20. With everything going on in life I was a bit late to check this feature out considering Houdini 21 is out. But it has been waiting on the top of my to do list and now that I looked at it I wanted to share my experience.
Rendering Oceans with a GPU inside Houdini has been my wish since Houdini 16. It is significantly faster compared to both Mantra and Karma CPU. The dicing algorithm is definitely different because when I try to render a single frame on Mantra with the same settings I get a completely different look. I can't say which one looks better because both have very different looks and feel. That is to be expected though because Karma XPU uses materialX shaders now. One little caveat is, compared to dicing with CPU, I think the dicing process with this workflow requires more RAM. I remember that I've never ran out of memory on my previous ocean simulations because of dicing but with this new workflow if I get the spectrum very detailed and bump up the quality of the dicing to 1, I often run out of memory.
It is a relief to just do the regular Houdini workflow and render with GPU support inside Houdini. As always Karma is fast to show the first pixels and overall compared to any CPU renderers obviously a lot faster.
Container in the Ocean