Not enough VRAM to render 4K

[arjun_simha]

I was loading in the files for the Building Utopia competition (https://buildingutopia.cgarchitect.com) and just tried to do a simple 4K render. Even though I have a RTX 3080 with 10 gigs of VRAM, I was unable to render in 4K (could only render at 1080p or 1440p). However, in the competition guidelines, it says that only an RTX 2080 Super (with 8 gigs of VRAM) is recommended. Any ideas on how to get the scene to render in 4K?

[vladimir.nedev]

Do you want to render with the denoiser enabled or disabled ?

There is an inefficiency in our code right now, even if you have the denoiser disabled, we will still allocate the memory necessary for all its buffers, which is quite a lot in 4K resolution.

We have to improve this, but I don't know what you could do before that.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[npg]

You could try disabling this option in Edit->Preferences. It is meant to prevent crashes, but when you're just only slightly above the limits it would probably still work fine without the safety checks.

[arjun_simha]

Thanks for the quick response Vladimir and Nikola! I've tried disabling safe GPU allocations, but the application has crashed every time I do that. I'll probably just wait for some optimization updates in the future since there is no tight deadline!

[arjun_simha]

Never mind! I just tried disabling safe GPU allocations (via the settings/preferences menu versus the popup that appears) and it seems to work! I think it was barely above the VRAM limit so it worked fine. I'll reply to this thread if any more issues appear.