New Nvidia Studio 516.93 driver breaks V-Ray 6

[alex_mcmillan]

Hi all

I updated to the latest Nvidia studio driver that was released earlier today in hope that it can improve my render speeds and overall performance however when I use the VFB or attempt a render of an existing product, I receive the error 'Installed driver version (516.93) is newer than the latest verified one' with a black screen in my render view. It was working completely fine before I updated my GPU driver.

Will this be addressed or do I have to wait for V-Ray to verify the GPU driver in order to continue? I really hope not.

Thanks in advance.

[^Lele^]

Will this be addressed or do I have to wait for V-Ray to verify the GPU driver in order to continue? I really hope not.

You're better off reverting to the driver we suggest.
Fixes are in the future, in any case, and they can't come with specific guarantees that V-Ray will work with a specific driver version, as we are only half of the equation.
Drivers are highly unlikely to offer blanket speed-ups, anyway. If they did, you'd know from us as we'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

[alex_mcmillan]

Then what's the point of Nvidias newest studio driver? It does say it increases performance in V-Ray 6 and has been built for such.

[^Lele^]

Then what's the point of Nvidias newest studio driver? It does say it increases performance in V-Ray 6 and has been built for such.

You're asking in the wrong place: we didn't make those claims.
Read through the release, and not just the title, and you'll see they do not mention *one* specific feature being accelerated by the drivers, but rather mention that because V-Ray 6 has the ability to select the denoising GPU separately from the rendering one, performance is "nearly doubled".
As mentioned, if you want the best we can offer, you should follow our guidelines, and that extends to driver versions for any GPU-enabled application (f.e. Vantage).
If then things do not work, it's on us to fix them.

[alex_mcmillan]

Sorry, I know that you didn't make those claims I just thought that Chaos would be working in partnership with Nvidia with the Studio driver release to help optimise V-Ray 6 for RTX cards.

I have an RTX 3090 but V-Ray and 3DS Max just isn't working too well and constantly crashing so I thought maybe this studio driver may help fix some issues I was having. Would love for V-Ray 6 to come to Unreal Engine as I feel that's the best workflow.

[^Lele^]

No worries: we do work in partnership, but it's not an instantaneous thing to marry the two developments.
You generally have all you need in the V-Ray log (last tab of the VFB): on GPU renderer start it'll let you know what driver you should be using.

On the crashes, it could be anything from thermal issues to -you guessed- wrong drivers, to something on our side that's scene specific.
If the crash is repeatable, write to Support (or in here) and you'll find help.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hey alex_mcmillan and welcome to the forums,

As my colleague Lele mentioned, we test a verified driver extensively with our products before recommending it on the GPU page and V-Ray's log
And yes we work closely with Nvidia on the topic of drivers, but we are not their only partner. You can check the changelog for a new driver, if you are curious. It is mostly changes related to new games or bug fixes to specific apps.
Please use the recommended driver, and make sure to use the Clean Install option in the install dialogue. There is no need to update unless you see a message in the log about it, sticking to our recommended driver saves you a lot of trouble, not just with V-Ray GPU

The experience with V-Ray GPU and the current recommended driver is solid and reliable. If you come across any crashes, please open a new thread, we will help you with that.

Best,
Muhammed

[wdgdallas_]

For those googling.. What is the reccomended driver and where can we find that info. Getting

11/30/2022 9:15:39 PM	Error	[V-Ray] [MemoryManagerGpu::setupManagedMemoryInstance] 2: Could not allocate device buffer with size: 3031776 bytes
11/30/2022 9:15:39 PM	Error	[V-Ray] [VUtils::VOptix::ContextImpl::buildAccelerationStru cture] 7001: OptiX error encountered in vray_optix7.cpp[2957]. Error Code 7001
11/30/2022 9:15:40 PM	Error	[V-Ray] [RTOpenCL_impl::validate] 1: Abort was requested.
11/30/2022 9:17:54 PM	Error	[V-Ray] Failed to allocate 201670000 bytes, device 0, buffer default bufname

updated to driver 526.98 with 2080 ti and similar messages on 2 other PC's with various drivers.

Not seeing the info on these:

https://www.chaos.com/vray-gpu
https://docs.chaos.com/display/VSKETCHUP/GPU+Rendering <-- looks like a good place to add it...

edit: found it buried in the warnings... 512 is suggested as of 11/22. That was released early summer?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hey wdgdallas_

We are updating the recommended driver to 526.98, it will be what we recommend moving forward with V-Ray GPU
The error you are getting is related to running out of GPU memory, check out my post here on managing GPU memory

If you get me a scene I will check on my side as well

On another note, we will change where the recommended driver is displayed. Thank you for the feedback

Best,
Muhammed