How to see which portions of scene need most ram

[tricky]

I'm trying to learn which portions of my scene are using most ram when rendering so that I can start to fine tune and optimize my scenes. What kind of technique should I be using to do this?

(I have a scene at the moment where Windows is telling me it is using 9.7GB when rendering! The scene is very simple - a rug (with vray fur), a high poly bed, 4 or 5 lights, curtains with a vray2sided mtl on them. Nothing special really. 9.4Gb seems a lot, especially when I set the max limit to 7.5GB in vray!)

[vlado]

There may not be much of a connection between memory usage on the CPU and on the GPU, so it might make more sense to look at the GPU usage directly, f.e. using a tool like EVGA precision. If you render the scene with a white material override you can see how much memory it needs just for the geometry/lights. With that said, you can fit a fair amount of geometry on the GPU; it is usually the textures that are a problem.

Best regards,
Vlado

[tricky]

There may not be much of a connection between memory usage on the CPU and on the GPU, so it might make more sense to look at the GPU usage directly, f.e. using a tool like EVGA precision. If you render the scene with a white material override you can see how much memory it needs just for the geometry/lights. With that said, you can fit a fair amount of geometry on the GPU; it is usually the textures that are a problem.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado - I will investigate that.

Unrelated to RT, if I wanted to see how much RAM my scene is using to render, how might I go about this? I'm just surprised that my relatively simple scene is taking so much to render. I am using XREF materials from a separate scene (which has A LOT of materials assigned to little boxes, though only a very few are used in this particular main scene) - could this be an issue?

[tashko.zashev]

if I wanted to see how much RAM my scene is using to render

Probably is not the most precise method but you can track the memory use for "3dsmax.exe" process in windows task manager.