Time for the yearly GPU rant

[kosso_olli]

Alright, new year, new releases, next try for GPU next. Well, what can I say: It still doesn't work. I have a 1080 GTX Ti with 12GB(!), and first things GPU Next says it's out of RAM. Okay, try again with mip mapped textures. Now it says the stuff in the screenshot.
Really, I don't get tired of saying how useless this is. Honestly, I try GPU whenever a new release is out, for the past 3 or 4 years. Never ever have I completed a single image in production conditions! What the hell am I doing wrong that others seem to get right? Is it the resolution? I don't render silly animations in HD res, the stuff I do is for print in resolutions beyond 10k per single image.

Another thing I encountered: I have no secondary matte slot in the environment. How am I supposed to render a car with matte shadows on a provided background?

If you need the scene, tell me.

[matanov]

If you need the scene, tell me.

Yes, please.

[kosso_olli]

I get it to work on a simple teapot scene, yay!
Next thing: The ground projection feature for the VrayHDRI doesn't work. Showstopper for me. Will try again next year, thanks for the effort!

And something more: As I have to rely on mip mapped textures to get it to render in the first place, my backdrop now looks like back in 2002.

[kosso_olli]

Yes, please.

I just realized you already have it. It is the same scene as in the problem described here: https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...n-heavy-scenes
Switch to Next GPU, watch it fail.

[savage309]

Sorry for your problems.

It is not out of mem. It says that you don't have CUDA capable devices. It happens often on Windows update the OS to make them unstable.
Please reinstall driver 388, restart PC and try again. With this drivers, anything can happen. We don't really controll this.

Resolution doesn't matter for V-Ray GPU rendering.

Features that are not supported in the GPU engine are now disabled, so there is no confusion. There are ways to workaround the secondary matte in post.
The background looking so bad is strange though, I hope Peter will help there.

Best,
Blago.

[kosso_olli]

Okay, will try to update the drivers.
The HDRI for the background is quite big, it is around 18k in width. Maybe something goes wrong when scaling it down?

[savage309]

Okay, will try to update the drivers.
The HDRI for the background is quite big, it is around 18k in width. Maybe something goes wrong when scaling it down?

We don't scale background/light textures, so this is why it is weird. I hope Peter will be able to help by reproducing this here and we will track it down.

Best,
Blago.

[matanov]

It surely can fit on your GPU, just use the stable 388 driver. About the other things - I'll check them tomorrow.

[kosso_olli]

Okay, next try with driver 388. Still doesn't work, I give up. Again. Next try next year. I am sure I will never ever render with this. It is beyond me how anyone can use this GPU experiment in production!
Best thing, I always have to restart Max after this happens, because at the next hit of the render button, I instantly get an error message.

[kosso_olli]

That Andre Matos guy from Porsche, how the hell is he doing renderings with this? What the heck is the secret ingredient to get this stuff to work?

[kosso_olli]

It crashes as soon as I render with materials. Rendering with grey override renders fine. Great!
Still, Cuda error 700.

[kosso_olli]

Just tried another scene that rendered fine yesterday, even with driver 398.

[savage309]

Is it possible for you to send us the scene that causes you troubles, so we can take a look please?
Or it is with the scene that we already have? To be honest we checked that it works fine with nightly, we are checking with the official release right away.

Thanks,
Best,
Blago.

[savage309]

Okay, it seems like it works here as it should and we can't reproduce this crash.
We will continue trying though, but if you have time to, it would help us to do a remote session whenever you can, so we can check if it us, or something with the env/setup.

Thanks for the patience and sorry for the troubles. Sometimes no matter how hard we try, there are frustrating situations like this .
Alternatively if you want, I can send you latest nightly build with some fixes to see if this will help. It might, but if it doesn't, it will mean that we have wasted even more of your time. If you want to try it in advance though, please ping me.

Best,
Blago.

[kosso_olli]

Well, I feel a remote session would be best. I can open the two scenes that are giving trouble, and you can see what happens. I'm out of ideas. We have teamviewer installed already, as we use it to monitor our rendernodes.