Vray 2.0: Excessive RAM usage

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

We use a lot of displacement in our workflow and large textures...add some fur, big geometry and youre there in no time ))

[peterguthrie]

I go over 12gb all the time. Grass, trees, big textures etc.

[BBB3]

I couldn't do without displacement. I use it all the time and everywhere...

[pixela]

+1 from me too- for the environment variable.

[cecofuli]

Same problem here after VRay 2.1 switch
For this project, 24 GB ram is not enough.
VRay start with, I don't know, 19 GB of RAM and after some hours... HHD swapping

I use obviously QMC+QMC with little buckets size, low max tree and high than default Face/level, but I not solve the problem...

It's interesting see with the "old" RAM method the difference...




OTHER VIEW

Bye...

[pixela]

Any news about this environment variable?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

24 gb ram to fill... easy... if u render output is at 15-10k pixels.. Im running to shop tomorrow to get extra ram to soften my workflow argh !

But yea the would be great to have that option tbh. It might make it easier for me too..

Thanks, ciao.

[BBB3]

Yes, would love to know if Vlado has an update on this. Working on a scene right now that is topping 10GB to render and is only about 1/3 finished - and slowly running out of optimisation options...

[vlado]

I will be able to get you an updated build sometime next week... if you are interested, please email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[BBB3]

Great to hear that. Email is on the way.

[peterguthrie]

thanks Vlado!!! email on its way

[RSI]

Hi Vlado, I'm running out of memory:
I work all the day on a scene, the lightcache was working. I reboot, now the lightcache start, say 91hours and freeze.
I already send you an email, can I have the fix also please?

Hello, sorry we are a bit stressed here (animation deadline on monday), we finally reduce all the textures and desactivated the displacement, it's working now.

[im.thatoneguy]

I'm not sure I'm running into the same problem. My problem is that VRay seems to be using up the "Cache" as listed in the Task Manager.

The system has 8GB of RAM.

Max is taking 3.1GB
But the Physical Memory section is as follows:
Total - 8186
Cached - 4051
Free - 0

As far I can tell I have another 3.1 GB free

As a result it's rendering about 8x slower than on my desktop with 16GB of RAM.

[JohnVK]

I'm not sure I'm running into the same problem. My problem is that VRay seems to be using up the "Cache" as listed in the Task Manager.

The system has 8GB of RAM.

Max is taking 3.1GB
But the Physical Memory section is as follows:
Total - 8186
Cached - 4051
Free - 0

As far I can tell I have another 3.1 GB free

As a result it's rendering about 8x slower than on my desktop with 16GB of RAM.

Hi Gavin,

As a matter of fact it looks like you actually don't have any memory available.

The "Free" memory entry is not the same as available memory, which is an entry you seem to be missing in the Task Manager dialog. Are you using Vista?

If you take a look at the Windows 7 Task Manager screenshot below (taken from a random desktop at my company) you can see how that works in reality. The Free memory is not equal to the Available memory. The way this works is that Vista / Windows 7 reserve memory for running processes in a way they can quickly make it available to the application that needs it (SuperFetch is involved here). Basically this Cached memory will automatically return to the pool of free memory if another application requires more memory.



Memory management in Vista and Windows 7 is a really complex subject! And for that reason it is very hard to grab in a graph or single small management dialog. Memory management is much better than what it was in previous Operating Systems though. Memory is truly dynamic in the latest OSes. Win7 is much better at that than Vista though. Vista seemed to lock a lot of memory unnecessarily which is probably why it seems like you are missing 3.1GB of free mem. That is, if you are actually using Vista.

In your case there is also 4707MB committed to the page file, meaning there is most definitely swapping going on because the physical memory is exhausted. The cached memory seems to actually be in use by 3ds Max or any of your other running processes (including the OS itself). As a result the processor is unable to perform optimally because there's probably a lot of disk swapping going on which of course is much slower than processor speed.

I think your computer and overall performance would greatly benefit from a memory upgrade


Anyway, I hope this helps you to understand what is going on and why

Kind regards
John

[rivoli]

I'm not sure I'm running into the same problem. My problem is that VRay seems to be using up the "Cache" as listed in the Task Manager.

does that happen with any scene? or with scenes which heavily rely on dynamic memory? proxies, displacement and so on? if so, have you tried raising the dynamic limit up to something closer to your 8 gigs of memory?