Dynamic memory limit never seems to help

[lukepenry]

I have a fairly large scene scattering lots of Xrefs that seems to build up ram to a point where it eventually max freezes and crashes. I’m really at a loss with how to manage it. The memory limit options in vray don’t seem to help at all. I’ve done all the optimising I can do, most things are either vray proxies or xrefs and scattered using forest pack.

im even using brute force/brute force which is faster for this scene and should use less memory anyway. I’m not sure where the ram usage is coming from I do also have a few vray displacement mods around the scene.

any ideas how to bring it down. Currently can’t finish an entire sequence.

cheers!

[hermit.crab]

This article about memory optimization should be of use. Otherwise, for starters, do send a screencap of the "Stats" tab i(top-right corner of the VFB2) and more specifically the "Memory tracking" section. It holds information about the amount of memory consumption for each of the scene's components.

[^Lele^]

The dynamic memory pool is *exclusively* for dynamic geometry by default: proxies, or rendertime displacement.
You can change this behavior by setting the "Default Geometry" to "Dynamic" (Render panel, Settings pane, System tab ->advanced mode, right below memory limit), and that will make *all* the geo dynamic, and obeying the memory limit.

You should be wary of two things:
a) Not all setups may obey this, for whatever reason (f.e., fPro may do its own thing.)
b) Rendering will be a *lot* slower than usual by virtue of the unloading from RAM, even if you have a quick memory subsystem. However, you won't swap to disk.

[TubeSmokeGuy]

When you have a lot textures, disabling filtering in global switches can help a lot. I had a file that rendered at 80 GB and after disabling texture filtering it was just about 28 GB of memory usage on rendering. This project had a lot of textures over 10K up to 60K and more pixels in resolution for both dimensions. Geometry isn't the bottleneck in all cases .

[q976431]

When you have a lot textures, disabling filtering in global switches can help a lot. I had a file that rendered at 80 GB and after disabling texture filtering it was just about 28 GB of memory usage on rendering. This project had a lot of textures over 10K up to 60K and more pixels in resolution for both dimensions. Geometry isn't the bottleneck in all cases .

Does disabling it cause any exceptions?

[^Lele^]

Exceptions, no.
But one such approach is as bad as they get for performance: we *strongly* advise to keep bitmap filtering active at all times, as otherwise the sampler will be forced into a massive amount of work, unable to discern noise from details.
It is also bound to fail with animations, as temporal coherence goes out of the window (again, unless much more sampling than viable is brought to bear.).

The correct approach to fixing running out of ram because of textures is to use Tiled .TX textures and set the texture memory limit to a coherent value.
The tools needed for that are all provided with the standard V-Ray installation.