Memory Question

[jujubee]

I have a new machine with more memory (8 gigs.) Im using latest Vray on x64 - is there anything I can do with this extra memory to make the viewport or the renderings themselves any faster?

I was under the impression memory effected more of the viewport display as well as loading in items prior to a rendering. According to my system, it is using about 1.5 gigs upon render.

Everything has been pretty much left at their default values.

Thanks!

[percydaman]

im afraid the bottleneck with regards to viewport speed is squarely on the video card.

[jujubee]

Ok. So what other things are impacted in Max/Vray by having more memory. I thought the ability to load in more models with ease was memory-related (partially non-GPU.)

[dcullipher]

From what I have found there are many areas where RAM helps, however the video card is pretty important as well. I believe the 64bit allows you to have more information in ram which sppeds up the transfer of that info to the video card whenyou are moving through a scene. You will notice little difference in peformance between a machine with 3 gigs and one with 8 if your scene only needs 1G to be open. However you will see a difference as you start adding more detail to the scene and getting up to scene taking 5-6 Gigs of memory.

As far as video cards, I like the quadros, but I just got an evga 8800 gts at home and it rocks for $300 or so.

[giraffe]

as well as I know, viewport speed is about videocard.
but more RAM means, more larger reso textures in your scene and anything that is related with RAM. for example more displacement.
and I think it speed up your renders too but I dont know the level exactly.

[trixian]

im afraid the bottleneck with regards to view port speed is squarely on the video card.

Actually, it's a combination of gpu\cpu with bus\card slot type speeds affecting things, and also quite dependent on how the view port shaders are written, but I guess in the case of 3dsmax, the view port engine is so slow that run of the mill shaders probably can't be optimized.

[werticus]

MASSIVE SCENES!
you will be able to have many more polygons during rendering

you can feel free to displace many object now and use lots of high poly trees in the one scene without needing to composite the image.

you need to go to the settings tab and adjust the dynamic memory limit to.... 6000 or so to see the improved rendering times.

you're looking at about a 7x faster render for a scene that can be held in memory vs one that has to page out.

that memory limit setting is very fickle however, i've seen 6000 not be enough where 6500 was enough to not incure the 7x slow down penalty hit.

also large light cache calculations can over flow the memory limits of machines with less memory and they slow down a lot or even crash if this happens.

[jujubee]

Thank you for your input!

[rpc212]

More memory means your machine won't crash because memory fills up with scene data at render time and then data gets paged out and eventually the machine will just crash due to data overflow. Of course, with enough data, even 8 gigs can be brought to it's knees!

This is somewhat off topic, but doesn't ram seem to be really behind where CPUs are these days in terms of memory density. I mean it is hard to find 4 gig dual channel paired kits, not to mention they are expensive. Shouldn't we all be able to get 8 and 16 gig dual channel paired kits with quad core processors around? Also the motherboards really seem to be to lack memory density as far as slots go. I guess it comes down to real estate and form factor for memory slots though.

KBO!