RAM on client machine?

[nirsul]

Hi

I consider adding 4 gigs to my 4 gigs client PC -
Is it going to matter that the nodes have only 4 gigs?
Also - Is 8 gigs of RAM better than 4 gigs when rendering ?
what improvement should I expect ?


thx for any info

NIR

[Morne]

well its not going to get any faster if that is what you mean. It will make a difference in that you can render larger scenes with more stuff in it.

[nirsul]

well its not going to get any faster if that is what you mean. It will make a difference in that you can render larger scenes with more stuff in it.

Well - that is a welcome improvement as I use both AutoGrass and ForestPackPro and surely need the extra help

What about Viewport framerate - will it help the GPU ?
Will I be able to move quicker in the viewport ?
(I know that viewport is mostly handled by the GPU)


Nir

[3DMK]

Well - that is a welcome improvement as I use both AutoGrass and ForestPackPro and surely need the extra help

What about Viewport framerate - will it help the GPU ?
Will I be able to move quicker in the viewport ?
(I know that viewport is mostly handled by the GPU)


Nir

It won't help the viewport at all as that is handled by the Graphics Card.


One thing to remember is that your render nodes will need the same amount of RAM if you want them to render the same as your workstation. If you throw a 6 Gb scene at them that you rendered on your workstation with 8 Gb & they only have 4 Gb then the party is over....CRASH!

And obviously you will need a 64bit operating system & 64bit software as windows running in 32bit cannot give more than 3 Gb of ram to any one program.

Hope this helps

[nirsul]

thanks - I wanted to know about the node as well

I already have 64 bit XP on all of them


I have a GTX8800 nVidia card - any idea of a better one?
I hear that the nVidia GTX 295 is actually a dual GPU - anybody uses this card ? Does the card work well with 3ds amx and Vray ?

[nirsul]

One thing to remember is that your render nodes will need the same amount of RAM if you want them to render the same as your workstation. If you throw a 6 Gb scene at them that you rendered on your workstation with 8 Gb & they only have 4 Gb then the party is over....CRASH!

Is it going to actually crash the system or just finish rendering before the client PC ?

What I f I resize the pagefile on the 4 gigs RAM nodes ?

I insist as 2 of my 4 PCs have MicroATX MB with only 2 slots (an issue I failed to predict when buying them)

Nir

[werticus]

Get as much ram as you can! I'm at 12gb currently and could always spend more polygons

[nirsul]

I wish I could - my MoBo only has 4 slots adnd nobody here sell RAM sticks with more than 2Gb each so I cannot supercede 8Gb
My problem as mentioned ealier is that 2 of my slaves have 2 slots only

Nir

[werticus]

Perhaps its time to ditch them?

[nirsul]

they are only 6 months old !!!

as I said before - I fialed to forsee the future need of RAM and only 2 slots...

[3DMK]

they are only 6 months old !!!
as I said before - I fialed to forsee the future need of RAM and only 2 slots...


I made exacty the same mistake and even though my nodes are a year & a half old I am not keen to ditch them yet either. I just have to bite the bullet & get some more ram [4gb sticks x2]

Increasing your page file won't help much.......you need to lower the dynamic geometry limit in vray so that your slaves don't crash.This will mean slower renders ...but at least they won't crash.

Cheers

[werticus]

Well if 8gb isnt enough ram, then your just throwing good money after bad.

You can use strip rendering, proxies, not too much displacement to save ram though and make it work.

[jstrob]

The best advice I can give you is to take the habit of opening the task manager's performance tab to monitor your ram needs. The performance tab show you how much ram you are using in real time.

In my case I notice it is very rare that a scene exceeds 4 Gb only because of poly count. But I do a lot of simulations (mostly fumeFX and real flow) and that needs a lot of ram so that's why I have 12 Gb, but even with fumeFX I think I never exceeded 8 Gb.

Also for compositing I like to have more than 4 Gb to flip 1080p frame sequence.

If you monitor your ram and you never exceed 4 Gb, then you really don't need more ram. But chances are that one day you will exceed it if you need more polys, like in a nature scene with lots of trees and leaves. So in that case you will be better with a security buffer with 6 or 8 Gb.

[nirsul]

Nobody seemed to clarify a doubt I was having -
Suppose I have 8 gigs on my client PC and 4gigs on each of the other render nodes -


Will it crash any of them or will it just render slower on my 4 gigs nodes ???

I am talking about scenes that I can render today with my 4 gigs ?

This is very important to me.

NIR

[bardo]

The only speed different that you should have it could be when you exceed your 4gb ram and the slave starts to load/unload data from the dynamic memory buffer...

If you don't exceed 4gb you should obtain the same render time with 4gig or 8gig...with the same type of ram modules and hardware in general.