Not enough VRAM to open projects that previously worked. What happened?

[larsandreas_iversen]

Thank you, vladimir_krastev, and thank you very much for the tips.
I received the RTX 4090 in the mail yesterday and have been testing quite a bit throughout the day. The scenes I have attempted to open and render from before use between 14 and 22 GB of VRAM. That's more than what my previous graphics card had (12 GB). As you have emphasized, this is the reason why Vantage has crashed. The strange thing is that these scenes were perfectly fine to work with and render from for two years. I guess my luck has run out, so I'll have to accept spending more money on a graphics card and more time on scene optimization in the future.

I have also tested rendering with Vray CPU in 3DS Max now. It's too early to conclude anything, but I have now rendered several times for over two hours without crashing. I have noticed that several of my scenes use around 20 GB of VRAM in addition to over 50 GB of RAM. Could it be that I crashed my Vray CPU renders because I had too little VRAM? I haven't had enough time to test, but I am hopeful that my challenges were resolved with a more powerful graphics card.

[npg]

We added support for V-Ray Hair/Fur and Displacement in December. If your scenes have such geometry they could use a lot more memory than previous versions. The other likely explanation is that DirectX was able to use system memory for some scene resources, but this usually slows down the render significantly and could crash with TDR depending on your TDR settings.

I don't think V-Ray CPU uses any VRAM. I can only think of the denoiser possibly using GPU acceleration but 20GB for that would mean some huuuge render resolution. The other usual suspects are the DCC app itself (Max) and other processes. Are you sure it's V-Ray that uses 20GB VRAM and this gets freed when you stop V-Ray?

[larsandreas_iversen]

I believe you are likely correct regarding DirectX and its ability to utilize system memory.

You are probably also correct that it is 3DS Max that utilizes VRAM. When I only have 3DS Max running with the current scene, I use almost 20 GB of VRAM. This increases minimally during Vray rendering. 3DS Max probably also uses DirectX by default? When I looked at the log file a while back, it said that Vray caused the crash, but it could well be that 3DS Max no longer manages to use system memory in the same way for graphics handling. This is far beyond my understanding of PC technical issues, so I am just guessing about things I know nothing about. Now I just hope that the new graphics card has solved my challenges. The PC is much quieter now with the new PSU and GPU. It's definitely very nice.

Thank you so much for your support!

[npg]

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[Luma3d]

I run into this sometimes especially after rendering an animation or rendering a series of stills that are 4k or higher. What works for me is deleting all the files in the Temp folder located under c: user/username/appdata/local/Temp folder. I'm assuming it clears some memory and I'm good to go.