vray render node performance settings, bios, optimizations, etc?

[vitaminpictures]

Hello,

I manage a small render farm that uses mostly vray 3 for maya. I'm wondering if anyone has any tips/tricks for optimizing nodes for this renderer. Bios settings, windows settings, etc.

These machines are a mix of ivy bridge and haswell xeons, running on win 7.


One thing I have discovered (in mental ray at least, needs to be tested in vray) is that disabling the prefetchers in the bios can yield a 10-15% speed increase in my benchmark scene.

any settings you've discovered that help/hurt?


thanks!

[dre4mer]

For a RAM intensive project the biggest thing that helped speed for me was using a dirty RAM trick that feels like you are getting more speed out of thin air.

On RAM heavy scenes vray takes a long time to UNload the ram after the frame is already complete. If you add an environmental variable to windows you can trick it into killing the process and immediately starting another frame. This gave me an extra 15%40% speed increase depending on the complexity of the frame.

The trick:
- Set the following environment variable on all your farm rendering nodes (not on your own workstation!!) VRAY_TERMINATE_ON_FRAME_END = 1 (yes it is important that value is 1) then RESTART the slave for it to take effect.
- Make sure the backburner task size is ALWAYS 1 frame when you render

The environment variable will make V-Ray instantly kill Maya when the render is finished and the image has been written on the disk.

Advantage:
- instant deallocation

Drawbacks:
- backburner will report all your frames as "in error".
- as errors are reported, backburner will become crazy, re-try frames, eliminate servers from the list... So you have to make sure that in the Manager settings you set Task error limit to 1, and I think you need to set "restart failed servers" and set the number of retries very high like 99999.

- if you set this variable on your own computer, Maya will close itself just after you render a frame. So use it ONLY on the slaves.

Secondly it helped to set a good dynamic memory limit in the scenes render settings.