max viewports, vray RT and gpu ram.

V-Ray V-Ray Common Off-topic
1

just about to test my current scene in RT.

however i noticed that my 4gb gpu was sitting on 96 percent ram just keeping max open. so i switched to bounding box, saved the file, and closed max.

gpu ram usage dropped to 10%

reopened the scene, and the gpu ram usage climbed back up to 94% usage?! seems displaying a scene in bounding box (even from a fresh file open) doesnt use noticeably less ram on the gpu than fully shaded with edged faces.

thats a bit crap.

so.. will RT be stuck with a couple of hundred MB of ram to use, or will it force the gpu to dump all the viewport stuff?
only one way to find out i guess.

2

I don’t actually know - you’ll have to tell us what happens.

Best regards,
Vlado

3

You could try disabling showing all maps in viewport from the material editor?

4

ive got it set to “bounding box” so (in theory) it should be loading barely anything into the gpu. however seems Max dumps the whole scene to gpu irrespective of the rendering mode.

anyway when i hit render in RT, it progressed a bit, loading maps etc, then crashed out.. but i suspect that was due to the size of the scene more than anything, since, after rt gpu crashed, my gpu ram usage dropped to 20%.. suggesting that it had indeed, emptied the gpu ram before starting.

5

before you hit render, try this:
for c in material.classes where c.creatable == true do ( for mat in getClassInstances c where isProperty mat #showInViewport do mat.showInViewport = false )

6

make sur to not show the maps in the viewport and restart max.
Also, you might need to revert back to direct 3d as nitrous is eating GPU ram like a enraged dog.

Stan