Computer hangs/freezes while rendering

[KiboOst]

I have the exact same problem but only when using bucket rendering and only for a few seconds at a time, but is hangs often enough to make doing anything else on the workstation impossible. Low-thread priority enabled. My system is an old Z820 with dual Xeons and 64GB of RAM.

Exact same thing here !!

Core i7
Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1+performance update
3dsmax 2018.2
V-Ray 3.60.02
RailClone Pro, Forest Pro, PhoenixFD up to date

Never had this with max2014+V-Ray 3.5

[Vizioen]

Well my problem seems to be solved, apart from the frequent crashes when rendering in progressive. It seems that running an instance of VECTORWORKS alongside 3dsmax causes major slowdowns, haven't found any google material but with me that's the case. Both in viewport as when rendering. Very very odd. I can run Rhinoceros, Photoshop, Illustrator and Chrome with 20 tabs open, no problem but when Vectoworks comes into play it grinds to a halt.

[bos]

Hello All,

I'm going to chime in on this as well. I have been getting severe hang ups exactly as described. I thought it was a video card issue because it was more display lag than anything else. I can still hear music playing when I'm rendering even though the screen is frozen and when it comes back the render has progressed.

I orginally thought installing my new Gtx1080ti was causing the problems, but when I put my M4000 back in it didn't resolve the issue. I upgraded my vray to 3.6.03 at the same time but didn't think much of it. But after seeing everyone here with issues I think that may be it. I have been resorting to sending all my jobs to Rebus to get them finished for clients because the freezing makes my system unusable. I used to be able to edit photos in Photoshop and Lightroom, have another instance of max open and like 20 tabs in chrome while rendering on the same system with no lag what so ever. No I have to close everything on my taskbar to render and even then it might not make it through without a crash. I tried to render with RT and it actually worked a little better. So it seems there might be something wrong with the advance build. My workflow has been extremely interrupted for the last month. I need to deliver to a client tomorrow and it sucks when your one tool to do your job is not reliable. Vray has always been something I can count on but now I'm looking at other options and it sucks to say that. There has to be a solution, I don't want to stop using vray. I'll try rolling back versions after this job and see what happens. I've tried all the other solutions on the nvidia and max side of things so this is my last road block.

System specs:

Windows 10
Asus x99-a
i7 5960x
64GB ddr4 RAM
Quadro M4000
Gtx 1080ti (not installed now)
3DS Max 2018
Vray 3.6.03
Foresrpack and Railcone (current versions)
LG 27MU 4K monitor (I thought this was maybe the issue as well running max in 4K)

Any help would be appreciated.

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

Sorry to hear about the problems you are having.

All the hanging issues we've discussed here are related to the system becoming repeatedly totally unresponsive for a few seconds while rendering. In all that cases we've managed to reproduce here it is only about the system being unresponsive - mouse not moving, alt+tab not doing anything etc...

If you are getting crashes - that's is a different thing and we'd love to try to help. When Max crashes most of the times it creates a 3dsmax_minidump.dmp file in your temp folder - if you could send one such file it could show what might be the problem. Also - if you are getting crashes on some specific scene - sending it to our support will also help a lot.

Best regards,
Yavor

[KiboOst]

So, it seems we are far from getting a 3.60.04 fixing this. What could we do to help ? We have this problem with everyone here all day long and each day I got several ones asking me updates about this.
Vlado talk about some multithreading stuff included in V-Ray 3.6 ?

I can't see why the hell you can't reproduce it, when tons of uers have the problem. Even nothing running beside max I can get it.
It even happened on a single sphere scene I tested, but it tends to be more prone on bigs arch viz scenes, when playing with ram limit (maybe).

Would it be possible to have V-Ray 3.5 compiled for 3dsmax2018, at least to test ? Seriously, this driving everyone mad here!

[yavor.rubenov]

Sorry for the annoying problems you are having

Unfortunately as I've already said here:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...925#post965925

While investigating the freezes I went back even to V-Ray 3.2 and can easily reproduce it here. This makes me think that the issue is not related to V-Ray itself and more to some Windows Update but I can't say which one exactly.
As Deflaminis said here:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...951#post965951
it might have something to do with .Net 4.7

Best regards,
Yavor

[Vizioen]

I'm not sure but why .Net 4.7 is installed in the first place. Probably because other software needs it (not sure about Max / Vray / Other plugins /...) So uninstalling 4.7 won't be a solution I guess. Maybe a rollback of a previous 4.7 version?

I myself have noticed that most of the time it's because another piece of software (for instance Vectorworks) is running and is causing the massive slowdown.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

I understand this Yavor but something has to be done with this.
I ve spent more than 10000 EUR on my workstation and its absolutely crazy to with it with latest incarnations of Vray on Win10...might be windows thing as you say, but its not doing in Corona.

Would be great if this problem got high priority - for me its a vray show stopper for sure :-/

[anthonyh]

The `low thread priority` tick option in vray seems to have little to no impact on running in actual low system priority and never has for me. I always manually set `3dsmax.exe` process to low priority in task manager. Vray seems to take it`s host process priority direct from there. I do the same for all the render slaves via a batch file. It works for me but every system is different I guess. I`m Win7 though.
* It could also be that vray *is* running low priority but because 3dsmax is not, any benefit is negated and causes the lag.
Also I had an overclocked pc. When it was new the performance impact by this was way less if at all. The impact is far worse now a couple of years into it`s life.
Holy....10000 euros ! What Spec is that Workstation ?

[KiboOst]

We went to max2018.2 with VRay3.60.02 without installing anything more.
All 3dsmax prerequisites were installed months ago to not alter deployment reliability.
Also, we are on Win7 with WindowsUpdate totally disabled on entire renderfarm, nothing changed on this side.
Same for nVidia drivers, I deployed an updated version one month before the migration to be sure not creating several problems in one go.

[bos]

I just did a Full system reinstall... problem is still persisting. I am sure you guys are working on resolving the issue but this is seriously impeding the my ability to work with vray. Setting to low thread priority has not fixed the issue either.

[Gerzi]

I have the same issue here. It took me a while to narrow down the problem because I changed quite some stuff lately (new AMD Ryzen Threadriper system, switched to 3ds Max 2018 and updated to the latest Vray version. So I was searching for a solution on CPU and Driver side rather than application.

I did some testing with Arnold for Max and it doesn?t seem to generate the lag problem. (also Blender runs fine).
What I could find out so far is that it seems to me as if my `low thread priority' and also the affinity settings in the task manager are being ignored by 3ds Max or Vray.
I counted the buckets in my VFB while rendering a couple of times and it seems that even doe I've set the `low thread priority' in Vray on, put the priority of 3ds max to "below normal" in the Task Manager and also unchecked up to 10 of my 32 treads under the affinity settings, all of the 32 threads are being used.
This is also happening when I use the Script from Spacefrog. Everytime I'm starting to render all of the threads are in use.

I will now install 3ds max 2017 to see if I still have the problem because on my other (old) PC I did not had this problem at all. And beside all the hardware this is the only difference to my new system.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Any news in on this front?

[hoppergrass]

I too was having hanging during rendering, the rendering would still continue but everything else would lock up. Interestingly though I had a windows 10 update on Friday, now the hangs are almost (but not quite) gone.

[king_max]

There's another "similar" thread on the forum : https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...-3-6-vfb-hangs
Windows 10 is clearly having massive performance issues.
I too had to revert to Win 7. As I read somewhere, if the system is installed in UEFI mode, Windows 10 basically overrides all the BIOS cpu C-states and general TURBO throttling which in a heavy multi-threaded application can cause issues I suppose.

What I can see is that the common denominator for all the latest Vray issues is 3ds Max 2018, and not the OS, vray build, graphic drivers or system specs.

I'm currently working on a 15K ? workstation that on Windows 10 and Max 2018 performed far worse than my old core i7 3930K running Max 2014 and Windows 7.

In my case 3ds Max 2018 performed 50% worse on Windows 10 than on Windows 7, and 100% worse than Max 2014-2016.