Error Message when procedural clouds turned on

[julian_vonderschulenburg]

Hi!

I'm getting this message when I enable clouds: [VUtils::PinnedGPUBuffer::uploadAsync] 700: Failed to upload buffer of size 4!

It seems like it's a problem with my RAM, but I've enabled clouds before on this project and had no problems. Not sure why it would be different now.

[natalia.gruzdova]

Hello julian_vonderschulenburg,
Welcome to Chaos forum!

Please note that error indicates that you are using the GPU render engine for rendering. GPU uses VRAM memory (memory available for graphics card) instead of RAM (system memory). It is possible that you are running out of memory (VRAM) in this particular scene.

If the error is reproducible only in a specific scene try to optimize your scene and let me know if the error reoccurs. Here you can find some useful advice on what to look for: Memory Usage Optimizations for GPU rendering. Especially check the Optimizing textures and Optimizing project geometry parts.

As a starting point try to optimize your textures - change Resize to Compressed textures in the V-Ray GPU Tab: example. Also try to disable Displacement globally just in case: example. If you have V-Ray Fur in your scene try to optimize Fur settings, for example by decreasing the Count and make sure to enable Level of Details: example. If you have a Light Mix render element make sure to set Group by Group Instances instead of default Individual Lights. This way you can control groups of lights and it also reduces memory usage during render.

Additionally, try to install the latest recommended driver 551.86 version using instructions from this forum post: Installing the recommended Windows Drivers for V-Ray GPU on Windows.
Current recommended version can be found on the top of the https://www.chaos.com/vray-gpu page. This version is tested and approved by the developers and how it works with V-Ray, so it can be different from the latest version released by NVIDIA.

Let me know if any of the above helps.