Local sim vs deadline

[lander]

I experience that the system gets horrible laggy and also stop calculating when calculating large simulation directly in Max2016. (Individual sim files exceed 1gb). Whilst if I submit to deadline I still have full interaction with the windows system and the simulation does not hang on large sims.

Is this always the case?

Yesterday I had the sim on a steady 30% cpu usage for 9 hours without any saved sim frames that only take 10 minutes to calculate. Now using Deadline it's eating away without any issues.

I understand that not loading a UI will be beneficial but how much does it impact?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, some preview modes can be quite slow, but it very much depends on the kinds simulation - voxel preview and particle preview have auto-reduction, so they should adjust by themselves. However, GPU preview does not auto reduce so you should increase the detail reduction manually, and also mesh preview does not reduce at all, so if you have a huge liquid mesh, it might kill the viewport. How many voxels do you have? Also, in the latest Max nightlies there is an option to not load cache files for preview while simulating, so this might help out. Another thing to watch out for is the material previews - if you have a complex shader network involving Phoenix texmaps, this might be causing a lag as well.

If possible, please drop the scene to Support and we'll check what could be improved

[lander]

Ok. I had all preview off so that should not be the problem. And it's a PF driven fire. No special textures. I can both check grid and submit the scene. But right now it's calculating so it'll have to wait. Uses about 30Gb ram. Got 64 in the system so that should be ok

[lander]

I did some more calculations and I'm quite certain it's a graphics card related thing. I haven't noticed this earlier so maybe it's just the driver. (Or more likely me creating larger simulations) At frame 0 my PC is responsive but as soon as I preview fire/smoke when active in viewport with GPU it grinds. And any interaction has a 10 second delay. Quadro k620. And yes using the preview reduction does the trick.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Maybe it's more than the video can take indeed. Bad thing is that from the Max viewport we can't talk directly with the GPU, so there is some slowdown compared to e.g. GPU rendering's ability to handle the data, so usually the detail reduction would be the way to go. How many voxels do you have?

[lander]

I'm usually between 12 - 25 million.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Affirmative, usually above 10 would start needing some reduction in order to make it responsive - it also very much depends on what part of the view is occupied by the sim box, in pixels.

[lander]

I could make a test but I might as well ask. How are simulations handled if interrupted when they are submitted to BB or DL? "Suspended" will keep the max session going but what if there is a interruption. Say the license server reboots. Will it continue from the last calculated frame as from the start of a sim or will it automatically pick up from the last stored 15th frame?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

The sim would certainly not do a Restore from a backup frame unless it's scripted or done by a person. However, if you get a recent nightly, there would be a timed dialogue when connection to the license server is lost, which should not be visible when running Max in command-line mode, but should keep retrying. If you find this is not working properly though, please ping us and we'll straighten it out.

Cheers!