OctaneRender® 2026.2 for 3ds max® v26.5

[Elvissuperstar007]

Wow, it eats up a lot of video memory, octane, it's just two sources, one sun, a cube and a plane

[paride4331]

Hi Elvis,
Neural Radiance Cache is feature to cache and predict indirect lighting and radiance values, slashing noise and speeding up renders to near-real-time without losing quality.
Use it when: rendering complex scenes with heavy global illumination, indirect bounces, or interiors, great for faster previews or finals where traditional sampling takes forever.
Set low max samples (under 30), and render; it auto-trains on your GPU (Turing or newer, single GPU only).
Why it eats VRAM: It stores neural data and training samples in a cache, adding overhead on top of standard rendering, more with high res/samples/tiles.
Reduce VRAM spike: Drop max/tile samples to 16-32, monitor usage in Preferences > Device memory, disable for ultra-high-res/final exports, or use a beefier GPU 8GB+.
Regards
Paride

[paride4331]

Thank you!

Anyway to get better vram usage. Parallels samples from 16 to 32 use like 2 gb of vram, AI light uses like 3-4 gb of vram. That's a lot of wasted vram. So half of 12 GB of precious vram gets used by octane for technical purposes only.

Hi coilbook,
Could you provide some information about the type and number of light sources in the scene?
Regards
Paride

Hi Paride,
AO kernel, octane sun and three octane lights with some mesh lights that have diffuse light disabled. Not much but vram usage is huge when AI light is on

Hi coilbook,
It sounds like an VRAM overhead with AI Light enabled, it's an AI-driven sampler that dynamically weights lights to cut noise in complex lighting setups, but it adds 3-4GB extra because it stores runtime data for light importance and updates. In your scene, it seems not super light-heavy, so AI Light might be overkill if noise isn't a big issue, try disabling it first and see if render quality/speed holds up without the VRAM hit. Parallel samples jumping from 16-32 eating 2GB is normal; it boosts tile processing for speed but scales VRAM linearly, drop to 8-16 to reclaim space without much slowdown. Overall, that "wasted" half of your 12GB isn't totally idle, OS/3dsmax/drivers reserve 25-30%, plus engine data, but you can optimize: Compress textures using 8:1 in Octane or grayscale nodes where possible) and instance duplicates to minimize geo/texture load, or Enable Out-of-Core for overflow to system RAM (slower, but avoids crashes).
Regards
Paride