The bitmap pager allows 3ds Max to store some bitmap information (textures and/or rendered images and render elements) to disk and so to reduce the RAM usage, at the expense of some slowdown in the rendering.
In 3ds Max 2010, the bitmap pager is always enabled by default (in was disabled by default in previous versions) in order to allow the scanline renderer/mental ray to render large resolution images. However, this may have negative impact on render speed for some scenes.
The bitmap pager can be disabled through MAXScript by entering the following command into the MAXScript listener: ibitmappager.enabled = false.
This change takes effect when you save and reload the scene. The setting is saved with the scene, so the bitmap pager can be disabled on a scene-by-scene basis
Thats quite a serious difference. What if an animation is being done and the frames each take a minute longer…thats quite a bit of extra time if you have to render a lot of frames..
I’m afraid nothing I can do there for the time being - the V-Ray code is exactly the same for both 3ds Max 2009 and 3ds Max 2010, so any differences from there on are because of different 3ds Max code.
If you wish, you can send me a scene that shows a larger render time difference and I’ll try to get the Autodesk developer support to look into it.
