Max sample level set to 0 - auto exposure and auto white balance require light cache in single frame mode

[anna_hurst]

I keep getting these two errors when I try to do an interactive render. I believe my settings must be incorrect. I have a ROG Zephyrus M15 it has a NVIDIA Geforce RTX graphics card. Currently I cannot render anything interactivly with GPUs, I can do it on CPU but it goes extremely slow. When I try to do a progressive render with GPU's the whole application crashes. I am no computer wiz and have been trying to teach this to myself, but I think I am way over my head.

[seandunderdale]

What CPU do you have, and what are you trying to render? CPU rendering in Vray RT is still very fast and interactive, and in my opinion way more stable than GPU. Also, the auto exposure / white balance issues comes about from needing to have rendered in CPU mode first, with white balance / auto exposure on, before in will work in GPU mode....a weird GPU quirk. I used GPU for the about 6 months last yr, and while I got projects finished, and decent results, it often throws a random curve ball and you end up losing the time saved from faster renders....in my experience.

[anna_hurst]

I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz. I rendered it successfully on CPU today, but 2 pictures have taken 24 hours to do the final render. Is that normal? It uses 100% of my cpu, and almost all of my memory so I'm considering getting some additional memory, as this laptop comes with 2 additional ports. I really would like to find out a faster way to render interactively so that I can adjust settings in my model. This laptop is supposed to be a really good gaming laptop, so I thought that it would have the capability to render quicker than my Lenovo Ideapad I started on. Currently, out of the 3 computers I tried, that one has been the quickest.

[anna_hurst]

The graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

[seandunderdale]

The render time is hard to say whether there is an issue or not. There are so many variables to determine if a render is slow or appropriate for whats going on in the scene. High res (6k+) with depth of field and motion blur for example can take 12hrs+ easily. Id need to know more about the scene to know if the render times are too long.

Regarding the CPU, thats not a lot of threads, but rendering at 100% is normal, using all your ram perhaps not so great. You may be running into memory issues and therefore the render taking longer....so it might not just be a CPU issue. Look into ways to minimize your ram usage at render time, if you feel its bottlenecking. Im not a tech expert so I dont know about expanding RAM memory via ports....someone else might have to help out with that since its been a long time since Ive used a laptop and / or replaced laptop RAM.

The GPU you have is pretty good, especially in RTX mode. Id guess that it will render faster than your CPU, and combined with denoiser you should have a pretty fast interactive render setup. One thing to check is make sure you have a stable driver installed for your card. Thats one thing I hated about GPU rendering was errors werent just scene related, they could be driver related too. Not a problem on CPU. But based on your hardware, GPU rendering might be the best option if youre looking to exploit the tools you have.

Also bare in mind the memory limits of a GPU. It looks like it might only have 6GB RAM which isnt a lot at all. So you will have to be careful you arent throwing too much at it.

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hi anna_hurst,

Those are not errors, just warnings that should not cause issues/crashes upon rendering.
0 for max samples means you're allowing V-Ray to make infinite amount of samples, and some other criteria can be reached (max time or max noise limit).
For an IPR session this warning can be safely ignored;

The other warning is when you've enabled the Auto Exposure Value (EV) option from the V-Ray Asset Editor. Auto option for both Exposure Value and White Balance works only in Production rendering mode and Light Cache must be specified as the secondary GI engine, as described in here.

Nevertheless, the issues you are having are odd - are you getting the same thing on a simple/empty project? If this is project-specific, best would be to forward it through our contact form so we can investigate further. Make sure to use the Pack Project tool from Extensions > V-Ray > Pack Project, and mention this thread in the email.
If that's not the case, you can still contact us so we can arrange a remote session to investigate this on the spot. Thanks!