V-ray and RAM

[Animato727]

We recently have the opportunity to up our blades from 4 to 16 gigs of ram. I have ran a few simple V-ray renders and haven't noticed much of a speed increase and in some cases more RAM caused a bit of a speed decrease by a second or two. In what instances would V-ray significantly take use of the additional RAM and thus justify the upgrade.

blade:
INTEL XEON E5345 @ 2.33 (2 processors) 8core
HS21, 16 gigs ram

Thanks,
Patrick

[pnel77]

More ram will help when loading proxies or working with big scenes (renders won't crash) - the actual render time won't really be faster as the processors are responsible for render speed, not ram...

[rivoli]

there's not a particular instance in which vray can benefit of more ram if the scene you're rendering doesn't require it. if your average scene only needs 4 gigs, then having 16 installed isn't going to make any difference.

[Animato727]

I had realized that the renders I was sending off were primarily shaders. I sent off a texture intense test and was able to get max and Vray to gobble up about 9 gigs of ram. Thank you for the replys.

On another note. Shouldn't increasing the dynamic memory limit in V-ray to 5 gigs or so help?

[Morne]

again, this won't make things much faster. Increasing dynamic limit will just help with things like displacment etc and help your pc not to crash or cache too much to disk. Increasing this size makes you render bigger and more complex things, if you see any speed difference it is just luck.

[rivoli]

the dynamic limit is way too low as it is by default, for anything that takes advantage of it such as displacement, fur, instances.. it's good to increase it quite a bit.

[Crayox13]

But, by how much? I would really like this explained somewhere. Is it scene/hardware, or what, dependent?

[vlado]

It depends on the scene mostly, but if your scene takes 2 GB to render now, and you have 16 GB, you can safely set the dynamic memory limit to e.g. 13 or 14 GB.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Crayox13]

Will that speed it up?

I have 8GB, can I generally always use dynamic on, say 6GB? Or will that have an adverse effect on some scenes?