Compiling geometry and scene prep takes forever on a top spec machine

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hello guys,

i recently just bought a new Workstation with dual E5-2690v4 and 256GB RAM.

A scene that used to compile within 5 minutes on 3930K is now taking AGES its crazy, although all the cores are running (28cores/56threads)

I have default geometry set to AUTO now from previous DYNAMIC, but i doubd its the cause.

I have to say this is very unexpected...i thought ther scene woudl just fly.

Not to mention i am running everything ona local 1 TB NVME drive with read speed around 2700MB and write rougly around 1900MB.

I am very disappointed.

When it finall gets to rendergin everything is going well but the preparation phase is nuts long.

Also i dont understand the memory numbers in the render dialogue. its currently at P:77277 and V:89148

What is the V doing there? i dotn even have a page file enabled....

Please let me knwo i am doing something wrong
Cheers

M

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

so the long compiling times are not scene specific, i get them in other scenes too.
doesnt look like its single threaded cos all the cores are operating but the slowness is really weird.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

little update here:

even the simplest of objects like simple boxes get compiled for minutes.

i ve got the same SW setup as i had on my old machine, newest max and newest (non beta) vray.

[cum. m+d]

Hello Pixelbox,

We are having massive issues with compiling of geometry as well. But we have a large scene with 6 displacement maps at 4k resolution. However, we have never seen compiling geometry take as long as it has been doing now. It would crash my entire farm in distributed render even. Our machine too is top of the line.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

its so strange because i can clearly see all the cores running at the top speed....cant imagine why woudl it také 56 threads to compute a few displacement maps with basically unlimited ram. Furthermore, i am pretty sure its not been taking so long on my previous rig....
i will probably try the beta 2 to see if its doing the same.

i ve tried playing with pagefile in Windows too...but since i have so much RAM i doubt its writing anythign to the ssd it woudl nto make sense.

i have also noticed some sudden performance drops while compiling. Hopefully this gets sorted because i cant imagine waiting for a test render for 20 minutes only to begin rendergin :-/...and doing this repeatedly after every change.

[vlado]

You will have to get me a scene for this; I'm not sure right away what is causing the slowdown.

Best regards,
Vlado

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

file is on the way Vlado thanks

[ILS]

We are having the same issue with the most recent release 3.50.03 for max 2017. Reverting back to 3.40.03 the scene renders right away.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Vlado could you please explain whats the most likely causing this? Its a bit of a mystery to me. I can confirm its happening in the 3.5 as well as 3.4

[vlado]

In Martin's case, it's due to the code that generates displacement, which seems to multithread poorly. We think we have a solution for it and hopefully it will go into 3.50.04

I have no idea about ILS's case. It seems different (the displacement issue is in 3.40 as well), but he didn't provide a scene so I don't know.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ILS]

I get about 300,000 warnings saying "warning: invalid normal index found on face ##### - "-1" replacing with normal index 0.
I says it takes 352 seconds to set up the scene. In the previous version there was no problems.

It seems that the vray warning window only comes up when the scene is xrefed, if you merge the scene and render, the warning window does not pop up but the 300,000 warnings are still there taking up loading time.

[vlado]

I get about 300,000 warnings saying "warning: invalid normal index found on face ##### - "-1" replacing with normal index 0.
I says it takes 352 seconds to set up the scene. In the previous version there was no problems.

That seems a different issue. I think we have a report for this in JIRA, but just to confirm the potential fix, can you get me a scene to vlado@chaosgroup.com ?

Best regards,
Vlado

[ILS]

ok, i sent the file.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Thanks for explanation Vlado

[Ivan1982]

Same problems here, for some time now, only using GPU. It is especially noticeable when trying to render at higher resolution.