PC Freezing Issues

[N99hockey]

I am starting to run out of patience, everything used to work, and now no matter what file size (15gm - 80mb), how many or how few lights my computer will freeze during the pre-pass phase or should it make it that far, the rendering phase.

I took it to a computer place to check out and found that I had a bad stick of RAM. It used to have 8GB, but I upgraded the 8 to 16, did an RMA on the bad 8 so I get a new 8GB pair and now running 24GB. Figured the bad RAM was the culprit since it was running at half capacity, but no, still freezing. I had the PC Repair place do several stress tests to really push the CPU and GPU to the limit (or so they say) and it passed everything with flying colors. There has got to be something I am missing.

I am not using any Vray settings out of the norm, I basically set it up with the interior preset and any one of the quality types, and 1920x1080 or 3840x2160 and locks up.

Here is a little info on my PC

Win10 64bit
AMD FX-8350 4.0 GHz - CPU
Radeon HD 6950 2GB - GPU
8GB Corsair
16GB Corsair

SketchUp 2016 Pro
Vray 2.0 (and Vray 3.x beta)

I have a work PC, which is an i7 Surfacebook with 16GB Ram, and it run flawless.

I have searched and searched and with so much data out there its hard to determine what I should try. Obviously I could just start replacing parts, but I don't want to start dropping $$$ on pieces that I may not even need. Is the GPU THAT outdated (its 4 years old)? Is the CPU THAT under powered? Any thoughts or suggestions or even questions on something that I may have missed, I would greatly appreciate.

Thank you!!

[tedvitale]

There are a lot of factors that could be causing this. Am I understanding this correctly, the scene will render without issue on your Laptop but not on your Desktop? Does the freeze only occur when running SketchUp on this machine? Have you completely unloaded V-Ray from the machine and tried just using SketchUp alone to see if the freeze persists? I would also try removing just the 8gb of ram and testing with only one set of ram (the 2 8gig sticks). I personally have had issues in the past on my own machine trying to mix and match ram size. Sorry I cant be more help here, it's always tough trying to trouble shoot hardware via the forums.

[N99hockey]

Thank you for the reply.

Correct, the scenes will render on the Surfacebook, but not my home PC (specs listed in original post). SketchUp does not freeze, SketchUp runs well, it only freezes when I start to render. Some have 1 light, some have 30 lights, doesn't matter. I have also tested with just the two 8 sticks, because I thought that could be it too, but it still freezes.

I was originally running 2.0 and didn't have any issues, then I updated to 3.x beta didn't have issues at first but slowly started to have them, I downgraded back to 2.0 and still having freezing issues. I am now uninstalling 2.0 again, and will try to reinstall and see what happens.

[N99hockey]

So I went and uninstalled Vray and reinstalled, still froze when rendering. Then I uninstalled SketchUp and Vray, then reinstalled and it still froze when rendering.

I don't know what else to try, or do. This is insanely frustrating and really slowing me down getting projects out the door.

Any other ideas?

[tedvitale]

I completely understand your frustration. Have you emailed support@chaosgroup.com with this issue? We may need to get on your machine directly to troubleshoot better.

[N99hockey]

I haven't, I will send them a message now.

Thank you!

[Morbid Angel]

What if you don't let vray use all the threads, and for example check thread affinity to have 1-2 threads disabled for sketchup/vray. Will it still freeze? Also do you run HT, if yes try turning it off and see how it works.

[N99hockey]

Thank you for the reply.

Where exactly would I be able to find where to change the thread count? I checked out SYSTEM under VRay options and don't see anything there. I do see - dynamic memory limit - which is set to 1024, I have raised it before to 4096 or 2048 and still froze.
What is HT?

[Morbid Angel]

its in windows, so if you open task manager and find the application, like sketchup, or vray standalone depending on what you use to render, then right click on it and there will be thread affinity option:

http://www.eightforums.com/attachmen...affinity-2.jpg

HT is hyperthreading, you can disable it in bios only, so go there and see if there is anything like that or sometimes its called simultaneous multithreading

[N99hockey]

I didn't see vray in task manager, only vray license services, so I changed SketchUp from ALL to CPU 0, 1 & 2 hit render. The dialog box still said 8 threads, but it is running, I will report back if it finishes.

So SHOULD this work, with this set at 3 cores, does that mean there is something wrong with one of the others? Or was it just maxing the CPU out to a point where it just couldn't work anymore?

[Morbid Angel]

Let me know if it indeed worked, then I can explain perhaps why...

[tedvitale]

Thanks for the help Dimitry, I'm curious what the problem is as well.

[N99hockey]

It finished!
It was slooooooooow but it finished.
So what would that fix the issue? Also, is it a matter of adding a core and let it render to see how many we can use at once? Right it ran with 3 of 8.

Thank you for your help so far!

[Morbid Angel]

So I suspect the issue is with how your system allocates the threads / cpu. Since rendering is a complicated process, its often tough to find balance for how to utilize 99% of your cpu / cores and also allow the operating system to still perform at the same time.
I saw that you are running AMD, so this might be specific case to the amd cpu and perhaps some one from chaos can explain why it might be happening. But I know that recently vray has added an environment variable called VRAY_USE_THREAD_AFFINITY, which makes vray use cores more aggressively and therefor more load is passed to the cpu. While this works fine for xeon and multi core cpus, it can be a problem on a different kind of machines.

Your system is not really freezing during rendering, rather during rendering the cpu is allocated too much to the render task and not windows process so you are not getting any response. While this may be true, this also can have an adverse effect, where frozen or slow responsive os does not allow for render process to finish and so it halts infinitely.

See in windows environment if VRAY_USE_THREAD_AFFINITY exists and if it does set it to 0.

Also I can recommend to see about hyperthreading or any sort of feature like that in bios, and disable it. The hyperthreading puts an even greater load on the cpu but only gives you 10%-15% increase. If you can disable that, and if it renders fine, for the time being you might have to live this way

Alternatively, you can try setting the sketchup process to be at low thread priority (same place where you did affinity) low thread priority will allocate resources to os first, then to render task.

[N99hockey]

So here is what I got below:

So I suspect the issue is with how your system allocates the threads / cpu. Since rendering is a complicated process, its often tough to find balance for how to utilize 99% of your cpu / cores and also allow the operating system to still perform at the same time.
I saw that you are running AMD, so this might be specific case to the amd cpu and perhaps some one from chaos can explain why it might be happening. But I know that recently vray has added an environment variable called VRAY_USE_THREAD_AFFINITY, which makes vray use cores more aggressively and therefor more load is passed to the cpu. While this works fine for xeon and multi core cpus, it can be a problem on a different kind of machines.

Your system is not really freezing during rendering, rather during rendering the cpu is allocated too much to the render task and not windows process so you are not getting any response. While this may be true, this also can have an adverse effect, where frozen or slow responsive os does not allow for render process to finish and so it halts infinitely.

See in windows environment if VRAY_USE_THREAD_AFFINITY exists and if it does set it to 0.

I don't have that environment variable, I only have this one.

Maybe Ted from CHAOS can shed some light on that one?

Also I can recommend to see about hyperthreading or any sort of feature like that in bios, and disable it. The hyperthreading puts an even greater load on the cpu but only gives you 10%-15% increase. If you can disable that, and if it renders fine, for the time being you might have to live this way

I checked the BIOS and no hyperthreading, just something called hypertransport. Samething?

Alternatively, you can try setting the sketchup process to be at low thread priority (same place where you did affinity) low thread priority will allocate resources to os first, then to render task.

If I set it to a low priority, does that mean I can turn the cores back on, or do I still leave them at 3? If I leave the priority level whatever it is normally, and I just work with the core changes, how would I go about seeing how many cores should be before it will lock up? Is it a matter of trial and error?

Thank you so much for your help, its nice to finally feel like I am getting somewhere!