Octane Render crashes in the middle of rendering animations Tweet

[philip.gedarovich]

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!!!

[philip.gedarovich]

I forgot to mention, but the problem is happening in C4D R18 as well, so it's not a problem related to the version of C4D that I'm using.

[aoktar]

Sounds like a hardware issue. But why don't you put technical info for about crashes?

[philip.gedarovich]

Sounds like a hardware issue. But why don't you put technical info for about crashes?

I'm starting to think there may be a problem with the Nvidia drivers, so I uninstalled and rolled back to an earlier driver from a few months ago. What sort of technical info do you mean? The Octane render log file isn't providing any information. Do you think the problem could be due to all the different generations of graphics cards that I am using?

After the driver rollback, things are a little more stable but the crashes are still happening.

[frankmci]

Since it does seem to be GPU related, the first step for me would be to simplify the situation. I'd pull the 1080 and the 980 and see how it goes with just the 2070. If that seems stable, add in the 1080 and do some more testing, then lastly the 980. There are lots of other combinations, but that's the most obvious first round of troubleshooting. Sure, theoretically, you should be able to run all three generations of GPUs together and everyone will play nice, but real life is messy. A little process of elimination should give you some more useful information to work with.

[aoktar]

1-Try this driver

2-Try just with one gpu

and read this

Btw email to otoy support if you can't solve that. I'm not support, just developer.

[philip.gedarovich]

Since it does seem to be GPU related, the first step for me would be to simplify the situation. I'd pull the 1080 and the 980 and see how it goes with just the 2070. If that seems stable, add in the 1080 and do some more testing, then lastly the 980. There are lots of other combinations, but that's the most obvious first round of troubleshooting. Sure, theoretically, you should be able to run all three generations of GPUs together and everyone will play nice, but real life is messy. A little process of elimination should give you some more useful information to work with.

I was thinking about doing that, however, do you think that would have an impact given that I've also tried turning off specific cards in the Octane settings to no avail? Is there a difference in Octane with turning off a card vs. physically removing it from your system?

[aoktar]

Since it does seem to be GPU related, the first step for me would be to simplify the situation. I'd pull the 1080 and the 980 and see how it goes with just the 2070. If that seems stable, add in the 1080 and do some more testing, then lastly the 980. There are lots of other combinations, but that's the most obvious first round of troubleshooting. Sure, theoretically, you should be able to run all three generations of GPUs together and everyone will play nice, but real life is messy. A little process of elimination should give you some more useful information to work with.

I was thinking about doing that, however, do you think that would have an impact given that I've also tried turning off specific cards in the Octane settings to no avail? Is there a difference in Octane with turning off a card vs. physically removing it from your system?

Just disable it from settings. It should not be a problem, anyway you can try to pull out as an alternative.

[philip.gedarovich]

1-Try this driver

a1.jpg

2-Try just with one gpu

and read this

a2.jpg

Btw email to otoy support if you can't solve that. I'm not support, just developer.

Thank you aoktar this information is very helpful! I don't want to count my graces just yet, but I may have found the solution. I think the problem was due to overclocking the GPUs via the MSI Afterburner app. When I reset the clock speeds to their defaults, I have not had any crashes while rendering one particularly intensive scene which was crashing before after only a few frames.

I noticed as well that there is little to no difference in render times before vs. after overclocking. Does OC actually have any impact on render speeds in Octane?

[ryanaexavier]

1-Try this driver

The attachment a1.jpg is no longer available

2-Try just with one gpu

and read this

The attachment a2.jpg is no longer available

Btw email to otoy support if you can't solve that. I'm not support, just developer.

Thank you aoktar this information is very helpful! I don't want to count my graces just yet, but I may have found the solution. I think the problem was due to overclocking the GPUs via the MSI Afterburner app. When I reset the clock speeds to their defaults, I have not had any crashes while rendering one particularly intensive scene which was crashing before after only a few frames.

I noticed as well that there is little to no difference in render times before vs. after overclocking. Does OC actually have any impact on render speeds in Octane?

I'd like to chime in on this as your answer has solidified my thoughts. I have a similar build. 2x 2070 supers (literally got installed yesterday) and 1 1080ti (have always had). I had always OC'd my single 1080ti prior to getting the 2070 supers, assuming that regardless, at some level it has to be better than not OC'ing. I never had even one issue OC'ing the 1080ti and rendering via the queue or any other means. That being said I have noticed this issue in full affect since I installed and OC'd the two additional 2070s (only running those two cards with the 1080ti disabled in octane) with my renders being specifically vectron but I have the feeling this would happen with any content such as you explained in your OP.

After reading your post I realized that the one time got my render queue to successfully go through 3 different renders (385 frames each), I had also forgotten to enable my OC, meaning that the issue, for some reason, probably has to do with the OC directly.

Furthermore when I was testing my OC initially with Octane, even though my OC worked fine in games and other benchmarks with flying colors, If I tried to render something with a high OC in the live viewer, it would immediately go to a render failure. I then tried to slowly lower the clock till I could get octane to work which I did with the below settings, only to later realize this is more than likely the cause of the issue with the render queue.

I will be running some renders tonight to test out this theory.
Hope this thread helps somebody else