I wanted to flag an issue with rendering freezing on Vray Next Update 1 with all settings at default on bucket rendering (directly related to thread usage).
Been a regular user of 3.6 up until recently where I moved to 3ds Max 2019 and tried out the Vray Next Update 1. I soon noticed that renders would freeze midway through, I always render with the VFB and the whole PC would lock/freeze so I had to manually restart it with the power button on the case. I was unable to pinpoint a direct cause for a while and worried my Ryzen 1800x CPU was overheating or misbehaving.
However, I found similar forum threads of windows 10 users with different CPUs having the same issue with Vray Next. As I am running on the trial, I will swiftly be moving back to 3.6 for the sake of my own sanity mid-projects. Related forum post attached below.
I was able to prevent the freeze by changing the
VRAY_NUM_THREADS environment variable to 1 less than the total thread count of my CPU (so 15 I think). Since then, performance has been fine. I do not run any other programs while rendering either and I’m not the first person to face this issue so I hope that it can be fixed in a future update hopefully before I update to Vray Next for good.
There are some lengthy discussions about that issue in this topic:
and some other possible solutions here:
Generally - the problem is with the Windows task scheduler and there is not much we can fix. The render itself is not frozen - Windows is not properly updating anything while the render is running.
Thanks for responding during the festive period, I understand if it’s an OS issue (albeit a crappy one). Are there any suggested workarounds?
One render froze with approximately 10mins left so I waited a further 10 mins but got impatient - I will try some more renders in a few hours and keep an eye out for the next freeze to confirm it is definitely the task scheduler not updating as the whole machine freezes.
I needed to get some renders done today sharpish so I was unable to investigate further but I have reset the max threads variable and removed it from environment variables so the CPU usage is back to 99% during renders. I also set windows power settings to ‘Performance’ instead of ‘Balanced’ and have not had another freeze for the past few hours.
The reason I want to check is because the moment the freeze happens, my Corsair h100i watercooler fans calm down a lot, also the HDD write light on the front of my case stops blinking which leads me to think it has stopped doing anything?
Disabled Control Flow Guard for 3ds Max 2019 and for the past 5 renders that froze before haven’t had a single freeze. Hopefully this thread is of help to anyone else who faces this issue! I will report back if I have any more findings, thanks for your help!