Is V-Ray Next 4.30.02 stable ?

[JezUK]

I'm on 3DS Max 2020.1, V-Ray Next 4.30.02 and NVidia Drivers 451.77.

3DS Max is crashing out (without any Autodesk dialog box) - during use with HDR Light Studio (and V-Ray), and I'm struggling to isolate what the issue is (not helped by not having a fantastic memory these days.....).

I don't use V-Ray every day (3D is now more a side hustle for me)...

But slowly, I'm wondering if V-Ray Next isn't as reliable as I assume it should be (sorry, I know I'm pointing fingers here with no proof, so am not accusing anything at this stage!).

But to be MORE specific, I think it's a GPU issue related to when using 3DS Max and V-Ray.

Today, I was excited to be using HDR Light Studio on a project - hooked it up (for use with 3DS Max and V-Ray Next) - worked for a while and then after about 10 minutes of playing with HDR Light Studio, 3DS Max totally bombed out without a whisper of an AutoDesk Error Dialog box for me to complete and send to our friends at Autodesk.

I know that isn't proof that it's V-Ray's fault, but I have been having quite a few crashes and even blue screens (and when someone reads blue-screen and immediately says it has to be Hardware - I disagree).

So.....

My questions are;

1 - is my version of V-Ray Next the most stable there is ? (I read somewhere that there is a Nightly, but can't find that thread) ?

2 - Are my NVidia Drivers the best ones to use with V-Ray ?

3- Any other ideas what to check ?

Let me know if there is any other information needed - I'll happily provide it.

(my system is an Asus Sage X299 mb, i9-7980XE, 128Gb DDR4, 3 x NVidia 1080ti's)

Thanks.

[Neilg]

You buried the lede here - are you running vray gpu in max viewport mode constantly? as far as I see it that's a pretty experimental feature.

Vray itself is stable, but if you're doing that you're combining the less mature vray gpu, max's viewports, and your video card.
switching gpu rendering on occasionally after each burst of work is the more reliable way of working with it. maybe just don't have gpu rendering active while actively editing hdr light studio, it's probably a conflict better avoided. seems like you've already narrowed it down.

if you're not actively real time rendering in the background while playing with her light studio, it is definitely not vray, and blue screens these days are 99% of the time a bad stick of ram.

[JezUK]

You buried the lede here - are you running vray gpu in max viewport mode constantly? as far as I see it that's a pretty experimental feature.

Vray itself is stable, but if you're doing that you're combining the less mature vray gpu, max's viewports, and your video card.
switching gpu rendering on occasionally after each burst of work is the more reliable way of working with it. maybe just don't have gpu rendering active while actively editing hdr light studio, it's probably a conflict better avoided. seems like you've already narrowed it down.

if you're not actively real time rendering in the background while playing with her light studio, it is definitely not vray, and blue screens these days are 99% of the time a bad stick of ram.

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your help.

First off, I discovered that HDR Light Studio uses CPU, not GPU (that's from HDR Light Studio themselves - I say that because it surprised me, so in case you too didn't know that).

Inside HDR Light Studio, you can preview in real time in V-Ray as well as HDR LS's own preview window. What I subsequently found is that when I turned off that V-Ray preview inside HDR LS, 3DS Max didn't crash out.

I appreciate that I'm on V-Ray's forum here and it might not even be a V-Ray issue, so I'm contacting HDR themselves to see if they can shed any light on the problem (pun semi-intended!).

The blue screens are, of course, an absolute pain, and last week they were almost unworkable. I do believe it is a GPU issue because once I switched to CPU rendering, they died down (disappeared completely if I remember correctly).

I've had this machine for a couple of years now, hasn't been my most stable machine (others have been utterly fautless, not so this one, but I do also tend to blame Windows 10 updates for some of that which at one point were being forced on me. I have paused those for a while now).

It could also be perhaps that I'm using the too latest drivers (as I seem to recollect that Chaos recommend quite old ones for stability - so I'll look more into that too).

Finally, I definitely read somewhere that someone was having issues with using the latest NVidia drivers and Chaos recommended to go for the latest v-Ray Nightlies, so that's an option also - hence the title of my post

PS - I sincerely hope you're wrong about the ram issue - because I've had that ram as I say for over 2 years, and these blue screens have only appeared in the last few months, under specific circumstances (99% of the time when using 3DS Max and doing something with my mouse very quickly).

[^Lele^]

The video drivers with issues had issues with Lavina specifically.
If you open max and launch a GPU render, the log ought to let you know about what is going down.
In any event, at the top of this page you can find the recommended driver version. (445.87 at the time of writing).

BSODs are common enough when the video driver has issues with whatever the user is performing (however that specific action has come to be. I even get that in games, from time to time.), and Windows 10 doesn't make things easier choosing to update stuff on its own.
So perhaps if you got the machine in a "steady state" in terms of updates and drivers, with respect to the task you're performing, you may get the BSODs to disappear.

[JezUK]

The video drivers with issues had issues with Lavina specifically.
If you open max and launch a GPU render, the log ought to let you know about what is going down.
In any event, at the top of this page you can find the recommended driver version. (445.87 at the time of writing).

BSODs are common enough when the video driver has issues with whatever the user is performing (however that specific action has come to be. I even get that in games, from time to time.), and Windows 10 doesn't make things easier choosing to update stuff on its own.
So perhaps if you got the machine in a "steady state" in terms of updates and drivers, with respect to the task you're performing, you may get the BSODs to disappear.

Thanks Lele, I really appreciate your help - what you say is very much my own experience re drivers, performance and Windows 10. I do find that when I’m a bit too fast with moving my mouse, under certain conditions, that’s when I’ll get a blue screen. I will definitely try the recommended Driver Version you state and see if that improves things for me (fingers crossed).

I’ll let you and others know if that driver fixes things.

Many thanks.