Memory Management Issue/3 GB switch question....

[davehitt]

Hi there --

I have a scene that I am unable to render at print resolution. Basically, anytime I try to render the scene at greater than about 2200 X 2400, the workstation stalls mid-render. BTW, we're using dual machines with 2 or 3 gigs of ram, depending on machine. Based on my reading of the Help file, I believe the problem is RAM management. On Vlado's advice, I tried enabling the 3GB switch in XP Pro on the machine that has 3 gbs of ram installed. The switch version of the OS booted fine but, interestingly, the render still stalls and, in the Task Manager, I notice that it stalls at exactly the 1.5 gig of usage mark. It's almost as if there's still an 1.5 gig limit on the machine still in effect. My question is, does anyone know of any other switches in either XP or Max that I need to configure, in order to free up more RAM? Is there any other circumstance that might cause Max to stall ONLY on higher res scenes? I can render the scene file without incident at lower resolution.

Any ideas or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

David Hitt
Splat Productions, Inc.
Philadelphia, PA USA

[Morbid Angel]

David, I also have experienced this with rendering images larger then 1200x wide. My dr buckets rendered about half way and then stopped with no indication of doing anything.

My guess is:
it sounds like your having subdivision problems on geometry. Which means that you have too many polygons to handle at one time. Try tweaking the Raycaster paramiters. You can find description of param in here:
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRay...ams_system.htm

On the other note, after switching to 3gb switch you should be able to reach 2.6 gb of mem easy. At least thats when my systems start to crap out. Check to see if your 3gb switch actually works. I can send you the correct boot.ini if you need one.

Last but not least, you can try doing stripe render and combine the images afterwards. There is also a possibility of rendering to vrayimg but Im not too familiar with it.

[olitech]

Don't forget the evil Bitmap Pager......

[davehitt]

memory issue...

Hi there --

This is the boot file we're using. I got the instructions from a digital fusion help file post. It's intended to create a dual-boot option at boot time, so that we can use either configuration. The 3 gb switch seems to be causing weirdnesses in various applications, so I think it's a last resort, anyway...

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional with /3GB" /3GB /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

I'll try tweaking the raycaster settings, too. When you suggest stripe rendering, I assume you mean just setting the render up on two different machines and have one render left to right and the other the reverse, right?

I appreciate all your help...

dave

[RErender]

What programs are getting wierd?

[davehitt]

weird programs...

Well, a lot of networking issues began cropping up. Couldn't see the remote drive we store files to and couldn't save files locally out of max, even to the drive that resides on the drive itself. I read that enabling the 3 gb switch would cause problems unless the machine had 100 percent of its devices and drivers entirely win xp compatible. Im thinking that maybe the driver on the onboard network card might be wiggy. At any rate, the 3 gb switch doesnt really seemed to have solved our problem anyway, so I'm not losing sleep over the weirdnesses of the apps. It goes away if we boot into the non-3gb switched version of XP...

dave

[Morbid Angel]

it seems as if your gb switch is not correct, here is mine:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="3Gig Switch" /fastdetect /3GB
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

[davehitt]

Thanks, Dmitry...

Hey Dmitry --

Thanks for the read on your boot.ini file. I replaced the code in ours and I think our problem might be fixed. I'm rendering the scene at high res now and we've exceeded the 1..5 gig threshold that the rendering previously died at. I'm hopeful that your advice got us over this hump!

BTW, anybody know where I can find info about the bitmap pager?

Thanks again,

Dave Hitt

[Morbid Angel]

Bitmaps - these tend to take up large amounts of RAM, especially if the maps are large. Since textures are managed by 3dsmax, VRay has no direct control over their memory usage. However, you can use the Bitmap pager settings of 3dsmax to reduce the RAM taken up by bitmaps. For more information, consult your 3dsmax documentation.

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRay...leshooting.htm