VRam used twice in plugin. Serious issue. Tweet

[mbetke]

I don't know why but it seems the plugin loads an already loaded scene again complete into Vram.

Here's what I get:

Plain Win7: 200MB used
Opened 3dmax2k12: 320MB used
Opened my scene: 1030 MB used
Running the scene in interactive mode: 2200 MB used

With this kind of memory management the plugin cuts my 3GB to only 1,5GB effective before blacking out.
It makes the plugin pretty useless for even medium sized scenes and I can't push the scene further to stand-alone Octane because all Octane materials from 3dmax will be gone.
I wonder what people do if they have no 3GB card?

[Karba]

I don't know why but it seems the plugin loads an already loaded scene again complete into Vram.

Here's what I get:

Plain Win7: 200MB used
Opened 3dmax2k12: 320MB used
Opened my scene: 1030 MB used
Running the scene in interactive mode: 2200 MB used

With this kind of memory management the plugin cuts my 3GB to only 1,5GB effective before blacking out.
It makes the plugin pretty useless for even medium sized scenes and I can't push the scene further to stand-alone Octane because all Octane materials from 3dmax will be gone.
I wonder what people do if they have no 3GB card?

Why do you think so?
Does it crash when memory loading reach only 1500Mb?

[mbetke]

It's simple math. Today the interactive renderer kept black because the VRAM was filled completly. the plugin loads all the textures which are already loaded by 3dmax again. I use a widget which shows my VRAM and other stuff in real time on my desktop.

So if I have a 900 MB project it will occupy 1800MB at all while rendering interactively...it will never be possible at the moment to have a large project which would occupy my full 3GB with the plugin because my card would need 6GB.

[face]

...the plugin loads all the textures which are already loaded by 3dmax again...

Thats logic...
In 3DS, the textures should located in the ram. In Octane, in the vram.
When you use an ogl/directx viewport with texure support, i think max will load the textures also in the vram.
Switch to shading or wireframe should solve the problem, if max will clear the vram textures...

face

[mbetke]

No it stays all the time in VRAM. Didn't test with max2010 or without nitrous. But dx mode is terrible sluggish and one of my reasons to upgrade to 2012 was a fast nitrous viewport.

I think this is definitely a point where the plugin needs work. At least should the standalone get a functionality to interpret the new octane materials. I have a good GPU with 3GB but I wonder what people do with one or 1.5GB?

[face]

Would be nice to know how arion or others handle this problem.

face

[mbetke]

In their latest 1.6 release from some days ago they claim to have unlimited "everything". Textures,objects and so on. I guess it's because of Cuda 4.1 or they switch to CPU only if stuff gets to heavy.

[Karba]

No it stays all the time in VRAM. Didn't test with max2010 or without nitrous. But dx mode is terrible sluggish and one of my reasons to upgrade to 2012 was a fast nitrous viewport.

I think this is definitely a point where the plugin needs work. At least should the standalone get a functionality to interpret the new octane materials. I have a good GPU with 3GB but I wonder what people do with one or 1.5GB?

Can you share some of your heavy scenes for testing?

[t_3]

imo there is no workaround for such scenarios. if you need a gpu accelarated viewport and a cuda accelerated renderer, they need to share a non-expandable set of resources (vram). afaik there is no ability to "swap" out vram to system ram to extend a given limit (also not with cuda 4.1). thus the best way for heavy projects is to have at least 2 gpus; then use one for the host and the other for the renderer while working interactively, and do the final render "offline" e.g. in octane standalone - what should be fine for stills but still a bit problematic for animations.

regarding arion - there is a very illustrative sentence in the newsletter:
"And if you cannot make your scene fit in your GPU memory, you can still render it on the CPU at a very nice speed"
they seem somehow managed to get rid of the texture count limits (at least they say so), but that's already all about; "unlimited materials and objects" doesn't sound to be that big compared to octane, because i haven't seen such limits in octane (yet). and last but not least their max plugin isn't "live" yet (just an exporter imo), because they just announced a xsi-plugin as their first fully integrated plug...

[mbetke]

Karba I can do so. But it would be a large download due the amount of project data. Basically you could set up a scene by yourself and monitor the load. It will double as soon as the scene is loaded by the plugin. If it exceeds the viewport will stay black and do nothing.

Isn't there a way to kick the textures 3dmax uses out of the VRAM before the plugin starts rendering?