OTOY Forums

hi

I got a 9mio ploy-object
before I start to load it into octane, my PC-RAM useage is at 2gigabyte
while importing and meshcompiling, the RAM rises to 10!gig
when the model is fully loaded and displayed, the RAM drops to 5gig
the vram-useage is displayed in octane as 1.2gig

what is happening here?
why does meshcompiling need so much RAM?

it is the proces known as "voxelisation" - probably developers could give You more info 'bout that, but in a nutshell this is when all the info from CPU & RAM is transformed and transfered into Your GPU via PCI =) in that proces, let's call it "translation" You need a lot of RAM, by a lot I mean sometimes 3 or even 4 times more than Your GPU has vRAM (if You are going to full it up =)..

P.S. if You want to run smoothly put some extra fro Your system and other programs.. otherwise some info from RAM will have to be written to SSD (or even worse HDDs if You happen to house those) & You'll hit some reasonable slowdowns..or even worse stability issues or breakdowns.

hoped that helped a bit =)

Octane always consumes a fair amount of ram during the 'voxelising' process.
To make the most of your render card, as a rule of thumb, you should have sys ram of roughly 6x the vram.
Octane will page to disk if you run out of sys ram but this slows things down significantly.

thanks for the enlightening answers!
I´ll definately get more ram and a ssd !

A ssd may not be necessary but more ram might be a good idea.
The ssd would be say 3-4 times faster to page than a harddrive but it would be better to avoid paging altogether by having sufficient ram. Of course if you don't currently use a ssd then there are other good reasons aside from Octane you might want one.
It depends how heavy your scenes are too. Remember having a big render resolution can take up a lot of the available vram space when Octane is working but that isn't a part of the voxelisation effort. If you were only loading a 2gb card with average scenes but rendering large images and that filled it then 8gb could be enough to get by with for voxelising. 12 or 16 gb would be handy to have though if you were regularly stuffing a max number of polys in and the remainder was used for smaller images.
If you aren't experiencing obvious paging slowdowns with your typical work presently you might be OK to leave it as is.
I think you just asked after the amount of ram consumed rather than identified it as a problem.
Hope with our answers we touched on any info that might assist you

Octane is a gpu renderer you know. Firstly exporter do a buffer for all mesh data in pc memory, then send them. This takes very large memory. What's the solution?
1- take more ram if you need
2- or developper can improve the export process with doing divide all data to a few part