I have a plan in my head for what to do in terms of my workflow- I am planning on getting a machine with something like a 7920x and allocating 8 of the cores to rendering solely (right now im on a 4 core xeon) and the other 4 cores to photoshop etc.
I will also hopefully have a 1080ti which will be dedicated to rendering and a P2000 for all other tasks.
Having 2 machines isn’t really an option and it is not very ideal doing it like this I imagine but im wondering if anyone else does something like this.
My main machine has an i9 7900X overclocked to 4.6 GHz, 128 GB of RAM and two 1070tis and one 1080ti
Using it for similar to what you said, it works without issues. 2 cores/4 threads are usually enough for photoshop or modeling in Modo or Maya while having Vray rendering using the 16 other threads.
Same for Vray GPU, it works just fine.. I use one card for viewport/windows performance and 2 cards for rendering.. There is no UI or Viewport lags
I use the 1080ti for viewport performance now, but even with something like a 1060 6 GB you should be fine.. This is very popular for GPU rendering
Don’t get the P2000 though, you better get a 1060 6 GB or a 1070 for the same amount of money and it will be faster/have more VRAM than this Quadro.
Bobby, can you elaborate on the “command line stuff” I typically reduce cores in the task manager but from what I understand that is the incorrect way to do it
The below used to work for me, but not since the latest V-Ray NEXT update. I tried it again, shortly after I upgraded, but it didn’t work this time. I tried it again today, but I haven’t rebooted yet to see if it work this time.
Here are some Windows command line tools I found online. You have to elevate the cmd to an admin before you run it.
set /a CORE_COUNT=%NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%-1
setx /M VRAY_NUM_THREADS %CORE_COUNT%
Can’t put my finger on it, if it’s new max or new VRay, but it’s nearly impossible to do anything else while rendering. It definitely was NOT like this with VRay 2.4. Things seem to have gotten worse in this regard.
You can try to bring V-Ray 2.4 on your current OS and you will see that unfortunately it behaves the same. Something changed in the OS/drivers lately that brings this behavior.
If removing one core doesn’t help - you could try removing two..
I can barely use chrome while rendering which i know is obviously a case of the resources being exhausted but when i used to used keyshot at uni I could set the core usage in software which was super nice, really wish something like this was implemented into vray.
It already is - you can use the environment variables posted above to set it for the whole system. If you prefer you can also set it for specific scene with the following MAXScript:
renderers.current.system_numThreads=sysInfo.cpucount-1
which will reduce the number of threads with one.
Thanks for that info, il give it a go in future, however i meant more in the sense of a drop down menu/ button option just for ease of use. I suppose i would have to add that to the wishlist though
I`ve wandered into the 2019 Vray render freeze. I never had it with 3.6 nightlies before but recently I updated my pc from a Quadro 4000 to a 1070ti and in 2019 with 3.6 nightly the freeze was ridiculous, completely unusable. I`m still on Win7 and I always set 3dsmax to low priority in Task Manager but that wasn`t enough, I also had to tick Low Priority in Vray as well which fixed it enough to not freeze, something I didn`t have to do in Vray 3.4. I`m not putting my Quadro back in just to test but I wonder if changing my GPU had any impact or if something else in the more recent 3.6 nightlies has changed because it never froze before with earlier 3.6 nightlies and my old Quadro card ?
I used to be able to do a lot while rendering, while using all the cores. Now in 3.6 my system just hangs constantly and I’m not planning on setting a few cores to do ‘nothing’ what’s the point of having a multicore system then. I don’t understand how software can go backwards and the solution is to disable a few cores.
My understanding is, it is an OS thing and not a V-Ray thing. I posted some escalated CMD code, which solved my issue. If you search Freeze, you should be able to find it.
I read all of the threads concerning this, but what I understood from them is that you basically tell Vray / 3dsMAX not to use all the cores? Or I completely misunderstood in that case I’d have to give that code a try.
I’m interested in setting up my system as discussed above, but not sure about a few things
I have a Core i7-6950X 20 core CPU. I have not yet used CPU rendering, only using GPU rendering for now.
How many cores would be suggested to remove from rendering in order to have reasonable performance in other apps like Pshop, (as discussed above), while simultaneously rendering in max/vray?
If I wanted to use 4 cores for other apps would I run the first line of code set /a CORE_COUNT=%NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%-1
Then enter the number of cores I have which is 20?
Then run the second line of code setx /M VRAY_NUM_THREADS %CORE_COUNT%
Then enter 16?
How would I go about reversing the changes/reverting back to the current state if needed?
Well I imagine you would have to enter 12 cores because as far as I am aware you tend to do these kind of things by the amount of physical cores rather than logical. I may be way off though.
If you do only GPU rendering then you CPU should already have enough cores free. If you are not experiencing any freezes then you don’t need to set any variables. By the way when rendering with GPUs do you have one dedicated GPU for your display ?
Now for the variables.
The first line sets a temporary variable to the total number of threads available in your machine -1. The next line sets the variable for V-Ray to the value we’ve set on the previous line.
Best would be if you start with the total threads -1 and see if it works. If you still get freezes - change it to -2 and so on.
To reverse the changes - you only need to remove the environment variable.
Also keep in mind that after setting new values/removing the variable you have to restart Max/V-Ray.
We ran into the same problem and the only real fix for us was the setting the QT_OPENGL variable as explained here. https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/…fb-hangs/page6
For us the low thread priority solution only worked for certain scenes.
Regarding working while rendering. I did in the way that I had one max open for DR rendering where I unchecked “use local host” and another max for working. We recently switched from 2014/Vray3.5 to 2019/Vray3.6.
Now with 2019 it seems to be impossible to work on a second max instances as max becomes very laggy when having more than one instance open. With 2014 you could have as much max instances open as you wanted without a problem as long as you didn’ t blow the memory.
