I just want to confirm that I understood this correctly.
I have a render farm and I want to add workstations, so they could be used after work hours. Each workstation have two RTX cards (6000, A6000, 4090). My question is if you run the worker as a “service” will it only be accessing one GPU and not both?
According to the documentation (Render Farm Considerations — Deadline 10.3.2.1 documentation)
“GPU renderers ONLY work in non-service mode as Windows expects a GPU card to be a graphics device only. Windows does NOT allow any background service to access the graphic card.”
If you run the GPU using TCC mode…
“you will require at least 2 graphics cards in this configuration.”
So this tells me that running a Deadline worker as a service on a workstation is both limiting the user currently working on the computer to one GPU, but the Deadline worker also only has one GPU, so there is no reason to run Deadline in service mode on a workstation that is run by users on the day and farm during the night.
If you run the cards with NVLink and TCC mode you need 3x cards, as TCC doesn’t output display. 1x card needed to output the desktop, the other 2 can be NVLink’d and TCC’d to compute only.
If you run the Worker as a service, you should be able to assign the GPU affinity to the second card via the Deadline Monitor.
I think this article is old and needs updating as the driver references 361 and also Softimage (RIP). I’m pretty sure rendering as a windows service works but need to check this.
The artists do run both, as far as I can see (I will check this and get back to you).
That’s why I think it is better to run the worker as the user that is currently logged in, instead of as a service. My thinking is that one of the cards will be unavailable to use for either the farm or the user. Would have been nice to put the GPU in TCC mode after work hours, so the farm could use all GPUs and then when it’s work hours it’s turned back to WDDM mode and the user can use both GPUs. I suppose this would require the workstation to be rebooted, which is not good.