Hi guys,
This is my first time posting on the forum, I usually post on the Facebook community page but this issue is too complicated and severe so I thought it best to ask here. I've recently been running into massive rendering issues with Octane for C4D and I'm at my wits end as to what to do to remedy the situation. I'm hoping someone here will be able to help or provide some insight.
I am not 100% certain, but feel very confident that the issue has to due with recent graphics card problems with my PC. This only started happening for about 2 weeks now, right before the graphics card problems began, so I think there is a correlation. I'm running C4D R20 with Octane Render 2018.1.3, but the problem also persists with Octane Render 4.04 R2. In other words, both stable versions of Octane.
The gist is that while rendering an animation to either the Picture Viewer or in the Render Queue, at some point during the render, I can audibly hear the fans on my graphics cards slow down, and the render will either stop midway and I will be forced to close and restart C4D, or it will just crash and close without warning. This is happening with a whole range of scenes, simple or complex. One scene is using Vectron, another uses motion blur and depth of field, and another uses TurbulenceFD. Initially my speculation was that Octane just wasn't playing well with TurbulenceFD, but when the issue started happening in a number of other scenes, I ruled that out. For scenes that are simple and individual renders only take a few seconds per frame, the crash will still happen after a large number of frames have been rendered. For instance if the animation is 500 frames, then the crash would happen around frame 400. For more complex renders which take a minute or more per frame, the crash happens after only a few frames.
I also thought there might be a heat issue, but I've been running MSI Afterburner for sometime now, and max temps on the cards that it was displaying were in the low 70 degrees C. So hot, but not boiling hot by any means. I can tell a crash is going to happen when I can hear the fans on the cards stop whirring at high speed in the middle of a frame, and the card temps drop quickly. Now let me explain the setup I have with the cards. Sorry it took me so long to get to this part, but I wanted to explain all the other tests I've been running to rule those out.
Initially I was running an RTX 2070 Super OC and 2 GTX 1080s. Then a little over a week ago (a few days after these issues started occurring), one of the 1080s died. I wasn't sure if the issue was with the card or the slot on the motherboard, and I'm not very good with hardware, so I brought it in to my local computer repair shop. I had a spare GTX 980ti with air cooling so the repair guy ran some tests and ended up replacing the dead 1080 with the 980ti. But now ever since doing that, these mid-render crash/freeze problems are literally happening on EVERY SINGLE ANIMATION RENDER, except for the most basic. It's almost like there is some sort of limit of some kind, that when reached, triggers the crash. I've updated my graphics card drivers via Nvidia Experience app to the latest versions. I've also tried disabling specific cards while rendering, trying to isolate the issue to one card, but no matter what combination of cards, the problem persists. The only weird thing I've noticed about the cards in MSI AB is that the 2070 super is locked in at a memory clock speed of 7000 MHz. It doesn't ever go up or down, while the memory clock on the other two cards does fluctuate during rendering. No clue if this is relevant but I thought I'd mention it just in case.
So obviously this is a super weird and complex issue, but I really hope you guys will be able to help me out here. As it stands, I can't rely on Octane Render for animations at the moment, which really REALLY sucks. I don't think for sure it's an Octane issue per say, as I also was experiencing something similar with Cycles 4D, though I haven't done any real testing there. Basically what happened is that towards the end of a render with Cycles, it through a GPU error and switched over to CPU rendering. I had to force stop the render and then restart C4D to get things to work again. So it feels like something weird is going on with my cards, maybe the drivers? I don't know... PLEASE HELP!!!