Large Poly count and memory

Sun Apr 22, 2012 10:12 am

I am testing a high poly model of about 2.3M polys and it won't render...or at least not yet (15 minutes later). So I went in and checked what my CUDA resources were doing and this is what I see.

In looking at the bar, it looks like virtually my entire job is dominated by geometry, which I am not surprised about....the material is a very basic glossy texture with no images. The only image is the background HDR. But it says, "Total useable device memory 358MB". This is out of 896MB total. So I am assuming this means I have used up 538MB and still have 358 free. Is this correct? If so, why is nothing rendering? If it is just calculating, voxelizing or whatever at this point, it would be nice to see some sort of status showing what is going on, other than the progress bar and timer, which are stuck at zero.

Sun Apr 22, 2012 10:53 am

Total usable device memory means all the memory Octane has available, ie. all your mem minus whatever resources the system / other program are using. So in your case out of 896MB you have only 358 MB to use in Octane, which is all filled up, as you can see on the graphics. It wont render because there is no space for render target film (look at the value - 0 bytes)

To make space on your card, close all the programs you don't need, disable system graphic candy and *restart the session (*this works on Linux, dunno Win)

Sun Apr 22, 2012 11:45 am

I see.

Hm...I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to have to buy another GTX. I love hi-poly models and I'm getting killed with my dinky card.

Thanks for the help, matej.

Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:05 pm

If you have the room then get yourself another good quality 2GB+ card and then keep the 260 card to just drive the screen. That way the full 2GB of your new card will be available to be used for rendering. That is how I run my system. Or at least it was before I got my third card and then things got complex.

Sun Apr 22, 2012 8:24 pm

Two questions then,

What happened when you went to three cards?

And, with respect to the attached image, I still have a sizeable chunk of memory free. Did the render fail because Octane looked ahead and decided that it would not be enough to continue?

Mon Apr 23, 2012 12:42 am

Octane probably failed to allocate one of the buffers it needs. It will in this case automatically stop using the card.

You can have a bit more memory available on the card by disabling Aero and avoiding to run 3D applications.

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Roeland

Mon Apr 23, 2012 3:50 am

Is it because the buffer it needs cannot fit in the memory space that's left?

Mon Apr 23, 2012 11:51 pm

Yes, it is. It will run out of space at some point.

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Roeland

Tue Apr 24, 2012 2:30 am

Well then...We need a video card with 1TTTTbyte memory!

That should answer all of our needs.

Tue Apr 24, 2012 1:34 pm

treddie wrote:Two questions then,

What happened when you went to three cards?

And, with respect to the attached image, I still have a sizeable chunk of memory free. Did the render fail because Octane looked ahead and decided that it would not be enough to continue?

My three cards are identical (560 ti) so I either leave one of them free to drive the OS or if I want the extra speed boost then I use all three. Obviously if I were to use all three to render then I would once again get the problem with some of the memory being eaten by windows.