Common problem to be solved.

[3dvizual]

HI Vlado

I am very frustratet with using the vray RT. I experience a lot of problems regarding driver issues etc.

I have two systems. one with a k4000m quadro card (laptop) and a desktop computer with two geforce 680.

On both systems I get error messages from Nvidia when trying to render a medium size scene, the screen flickers and the render looks funny.

If I adjust the rays per pixel and ray bundle size to 6/160, then it works. (on both systems) If I go any higher with a medium size scene it renders with errors.

Is this not something which can be solved in the future.? It is very frustrating that you haft to pay attention to which nvidia driver you are using (cannot use latest, will fail) And adjust ray size etc. to make it work. I mean how should people know these things.?

In my oppinion it should be possilble to render a scene without problems, (may be very slow on a small GPU card, but still it should render without crashing or render wrong pixels.

Also the issues with different nvidia drivers for different cards. How can this be solved.?? I have spent soooo much time finding the right drivers for my two systems. Would be easier to have a list with last supported drivers from Nvidia (at least)

Kind regards
Martin

[Morbid Angel]

While it is frustrating, its probably not so much vray as much as nvidia. Their drivers differ between cards, builds, versions etc...you just can't account for everything. If they were to come up with unified structure for every card then it would be possible to standardize the renderer part as well.
Just think of it like this, why do you have to download separate drivers for 680 and 580? or quadro...You see what I mean.

[Alan Iglesias]

Dmitry makes a good point.

I'm afraid we are still "wild west" pioneers in the (relatively small) world of hardware rendering. There is still so much unresolved market positioning and related hardware designing/evaluating going on that it is obviously not clear even to nVidia which direction will make them the most money in the smallest amount of time, which I'm quite sure is their goal.

In the meantime, we must be resourceful, able to adapt, and certainly industry aware -- perhaps more so than we normally need to be or would like to be.

I don't like it either, but I'll do what I have to do to enjoy the pure freedom that is rendering with RT/GPU when it is possible to use it.

Martin, I hope you are able to resolve your problems soon. If I lived anywhere near you, I would offer to come to your office and help you, not that I am sure I would be of much help!

Then again, I've never been to Denmark...!

Best of luck to you,

-Alan

[vlado]

If I adjust the rays per pixel and ray bundle size to 6/160, then it works. (on both systems) If I go any higher with a medium size scene it renders with errors. Is this not something which can be solved in the future?

We can improve this particular thing by attempting to automatically find a value that works; however this wasn't an issue until some of the more recent drivers and we didn't have time to research a proper solution before the release. So for the moment, you can just set 160/6 as your defaults. (We already reduced the defaults from 256/16 to 192/8 for V-Ray 2.4).

It is very frustrating that you haft to pay attention to which nvidia driver you are using (cannot use latest, will fail) And adjust ray size etc. to make it work. I mean how should people know these things.?

How should I know these things either? It's not like we know what surprise we'll get for each driver release.

In my oppinion it should be possilble to render a scene without problems, (may be very slow on a small GPU card, but still it should render without crashing or render wrong pixels.

I agree with that and as I said we can improve things a bit.

Also the issues with different nvidia drivers for different cards. How can this be solved?

I don't really know. If someone knows a solution, I'd be happy to hear it. Buying all the latest cards and having someone here install each new driver and test it with each card is not impossible, but would be difficult to organize.

Best regards,
Vlado