We have been rendering out a series of hq animations over the past week. Every so often, we experienced the same issues as what many people on the forum have obviously experienced, namely random hangs after the ‘static raycast’ thing.
It has been giving us major grief as when this happens to a pc overnight, we loose rendering power from that machine until it is reset in the morning.
We have 6 Dual Xeon 3GHz with 2GB ram - all Tyan boards, all custom built for rendering.
The hanging was becoming a pain, so I decided to disable HT in the bios.
Hey presto, I now haven’t had a crash since 1pm yesterday!
Could the Chaos team please bring everyone up-to-date with this. There is clearly an issue here. Its been difficult to pin down, but obviously HT in our case has, touch wood, solved the problem.
*Could* there be an issue with HT, Max6 and Vray (1.09…r)?
*Has* it been thoroughly tested by the Chaos team?
No overclocking on anything in my system. I rendered the scenes with hyperthreading off and it went fine. Except that it took a fair amount longer than it should have because of the performance hit I get when it is turned off.
Hopefully this will be addressed in 1.5! It appeared to be a random problem for us at first but now it appears to be a bug.
Just wanted to chime in and say I haven’t experienced any problems between VRay and my Dual Xeon 3.2’s with hyperthreading enabled. It’s a BOXX system (not one I built myself). Been running it since April with no hiccups.
I think it uses a Supermicro MB and it has a QuadroFX1100 video card with 2 GB RAM.
Ive been thinking the same as Tammo, where it could be an issue witha certain board/chipset. I have 2 dual 2.8ghz Xeons Ive built on Supermicro boards and they both have renderd 1000’s of frames each with 0 issues relating to HT. The issue mostly seems to be with Dell, Asus and Tyan boards, if someone with a Supermicro board is having HT realted problems please post your results. Also in order to figure what is going on the best thing to do is if your having what you think to be HT related issues please post the machine specs including chipsets, bios revs, brand and type of ram…
Im not saying that the issues are not caused by HT but with more info I think we mite be able to narrow it down to a specifc problem.
Also if someone has a scene that will NOT render for them with HT enabled I would like to try render them on my xeons in hopes of narrowing down the issue. Just PM me if you wish to try this.
We have one supermicro and two dell poweredge servers and both give problems when rendering animations with HT enabled. So i think the hardware issue could be brought back to just the dual xeon processor on a renderfarm.
You’ve got me worried, I’ve just bought a new dell dual xeon (Precision 470) with HT enabled. I’ve not had any hangs rendering stills and I’m yet to try rendering an animation, maybe I’ll set one going over the weekend. If I do I’ll report back any problems.
A quick search on google showed that VRay is not the only program experiencing problems with HT, it’s not even restricted to Windows as Linux users are also having similar issues.
Microsoft and Intel have admitted that there is a bug in Windows inplementation of HT but it appears to affect performance rather than cause software freezes. This has been fixed in XP SP2, apparently.
I have x5 PC-DL Asus dual 3.06 and have to turn HT off for complex vray gi scenes, all is fine if you dont use GI. Its def a Vray prob not a hardware prob.
16 Dual 2.8’s w/HT enabled here, few problems (well no more than with Max scanline) with heavy animation rendering with GI and V-Ray. Most problems can be traced to network traffic issues not HT.