A tool to flush the Vram?

[Zay]

As there are tools to flush you PC ram, I had hoped to find something similar to Vram. But I can't find any. Anyone know if it exist?

The reason is that many times Octane crashes with my big scenes and only a reboot will fix that.
Im guessing that Octane doesn't flush the vram before loading an OBJ?

[radiance]

Hey,

I don't know of any such tool.
Keep in mind the GPU memory is also used for other things, like modern OS'es (vista or higher),
so if you would 'flush' all your memory, eg set everything to 0, you're OS will probably crash.

Crashing due to to large scenes is rare, and not normal.
You should be getting the 'cannot allocate memory, please reduce scene complexity' error dialogs.

It would be a help if you can give us some more information that allows us to reproduce it.

Radiance

[Zay]

Yes, I should get the 'cannot allocate memory, please reduce scene complexity' error dialog. But it seems sometimes it doesn't work and Octane will just crash.

I use Poser Pro 2010 to set up my scenes. In that program I can set the texture size I want to use in my preview window. If I have it too high Octane will crash. If I set it very low normaly Octane would work. But sometimes it will crash anyway. Restarting Octane again right after a crash might work and Octane will start rendering even though it crashed the first time. But if I start to resizing to higher resolutions in Octane, Octane will crash in about 60% of the cases and not show an error dialog. Sometimes when I resize the error dialog shows, but most of the times it doesn't show and Octane would crash.

To get close to reproducing it, you would have to open a program you know uses a good amount of Vram. The open Octane and load an OBJ file that uses a lot of texture memory. Then start resizing to a higher resolution. Small steps. Don't resize right away to max out the Vram. Then at some point, if you are lucky, you will hit the max amount of Vram used and Octane will show an error message. In my case that only happens 40% of the time. Normaly Octane just crash or show a black viewport just before crashing.

[radiance]

Hey,

The driver crash due to changing resolution is well known.
It depends and only manifests itself on some users machines, and we can't replicate it on our machines here.

We're hoping the new cuda 3.1 will solve this problem as it looks like a cuda/driver bug to us.

Radiance

[Zay]

Ok, resizing is a known problem, I hope cuda 3.1 will fix that.
Bringing me back to my current problem.

Just now I loaded a big scene this time in Vue. Started Octane and loaded the same big scene into Octane. Octane crashes every time when I click on the OBJ file in the Graph Editor window. No warnings from Octane.
If I close Vue, Octane will load the OBJ file and start rendering without problems. This is just an observation and is a known problem to me
I already noticed this when I used a 8800GT in the past.

Maybe others can test this with large textures?
My scene uses 999.2MB of ram in Octane. 1 OBJ file (21MB) and 31 JPG textures (40MB) (Yes, 61MB becomes 999.2MB in Octane ).
I have 1248MB of ram on my GTX 470.

[radiance]

maybe vue takes up too much video ram for opengl display or equiv ?

Radiance

[[gk]]

I can confirm vue is a mem hugger, sounds like a reasonable explaination.

Try do a box and port that over, see if that works. If yes, thats your answer.

[Zay]

Yes, there is too much trying to be put into the Vram. I figured that too. But shouldn't Octane give an error if that happens ? Or is it just looking at how much ram the GFX card has in total, compared to the amount Octane is trying to load, and not looking in the Vram to see if there is enough room to load the textures?

What Im getting at is that this is kinda like "let's see if it crashes or not".
I have a hard time knowing how much of my 61MB scene will be in MB when Octane has converted the textures, and not knowing what is already used by the Vram.

But I do know after a reboot I can use 1247.2MB out of 1248MB according to Octane. So I guess 0.8MB is left for the OS

[radiance]

we're planning on adding a system trhat will show you how much a given scene will approximately take before you load it. (in v1.1

Radiance

[Zay]

Thanks radiance, that will be very useful!

I was searching the net for Vram monitoring and found GPU-Z.
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/

A very useful tool for me right now. Didn't know that Vue used 540MB on that scene I used No wonder Octane crashed. Poser on the other hand only used 240MB, but I can adjust the texture sizes to 128 in the preview, so I can get it as low as 80MB leaving me with 1200MB of fun in Octane This has really helped me with what I can load and what I can not load in Octane.