VRay Frame Buffer = 6-8gb RAM footprint.

[kweechy]

Not sure if this has always been the case, but I'm finding lately that my VRay FB is eating up an absolute ton of RAM.

My Render Elements are pretty run of the mill, nothing crazy at all. Diffuse, GI, Lighting, RawGI, RawLight, etc, etc, etc. The standard 20 or so used to properly composite shots.

This computer will hit 24gb RAM and start swapping on me. I close the VFB and it drops down to 17 or 18gb.

Edit: I've been told this is due to the fact that the scene footprint is still stored in RAM as long as the render window is open. So I guess what my post should really be about is asking about the possibility of adding a button to the VFB that would flush the scene out of system memory.

[vlado]

The VFB stores everything as floating-point colors, so it may be normal that it takes a lot of RAM. For large renders, you can turn off the memory storage and write tiled .vrimg or .exr files directly to the disk.

I'm not sure what you mean with the scene footprint - the VFB just stores the render channels.

Best regards,
Vlado

[kweechy]

Not too sure what to make of it then. The renders are just for film, so HD +5%...nothing print sized or anything like that. Most of the render layers save out as files under 1mb in size, I think the beauty pass is only a few megs even.

My RAM usage on my machine will just sit there at 24GB used, even if I clear all caches, etc. The second I close the VFB, it drops down to 17GB or so.

[vlado]

Does it go up again if you reopen the VFB (without re-rendering)?

Best regards,
Vlado

[kweechy]

I'm rendering with an external, stand alone buffer, maybe that's the issue?

[vlado]

Ah, you did not mention that you are rendering through the standalone. In that case - yes, the problem is that the scene is kept in memory until you close the VFB. Will see if we can do something about it.

Best regards,
Vlado