I've been rendering some very heavy scenes with millions of polygons and my renders are frequently failing due to the amount of geometry. I'm checking the information in the console, but there are things I don't understand about the allocation of my VRAM… The console is telling me that there's a very large amount of VRAM unavailable and I don't understand how or whether I can free up this VRAM … The console reads as follows …
VRAM used/free/max:349Mb/2.057Gb/6Gb
… then, when my render fails, it reads …
<<< Render failure detected!!! >>>
Please check render statistics to solve the problem.
Device:0 TotMem:6Gb rtData:2Kb film:0Kb geo:2.002Gb node:0Kb tex:0Kb unavailable:3.784Gb
Check geometry subdivisons.
… OK, so I understand that there isn't enough available memory and my scene is very heavy, but I don't understand why I have so much memory 'unavailable', where it's being used and how I can free it up. I'm running a GTX 980 Ti with 6GB of VRAM. Closing any applications in the background like Photoshop and After Effects has helped, but it seems like there's always a large portion of VRAM unavailable no matter what … and it seems a bit hit and miss … sometimes my scene will render, other times it won't.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated… I'm running a Mac Pro 5,1 with a GTX 980 Ti…
… I'm also getting a lot of display errors on my screen like in the image below … I only put my GTX 980 Ti into the Mac a few days ago, so I'm wondering whether this is a fault or whether it's down to the heavy load being placed on the card?
