Memory, Scenes size, and a little bit of Mac Vs PC

[chalk]

Hi everyone!

I've just been having a little discussion with a friend of mine and thought i'd post this thread to see what people out there have experienced.

I'm working on a scene at the moment and it's come to the stage where im running out of memory when rendering. Its on my new laptop (still Xp) which has 4gigs of ram but as we all know windows cant deal with all that in full. I've added the old 3gig swicth with a uservar=2900 (so my drivers can still load) and im able to redner this scene now after tweaking it a bit (and taking off some of the evermotion trees!!)

So ive pretty much maxed out this scene with detail. It's as much as my pc can take.

Do any other people have this problem a lot when using one machine? I mean i would have thought it would just take LONGER if it needed more ram but Vray peaks at about 2,200Mb before rendering and any more than that gives me a crash. (could it be a vray prob as well>?)

Would a MAC with the same specs have the same problem? I mean is this memory problem universal or would a mac just get through it by going slower? Could you make scenes TWICE this big on the mac and expect it to sail though? do you EVER get out of memory messages with a mac? I would be interested to know!

Chalk

[stefan]

no any application can take only 1.6 or 2.6GB
vray goes to the very limit, but if there is not enough it also cannot go over the OS limit.

that has nothing to do with vray but with microsoft. the 32bit os has this limit.

cheers
stefan

p.s best is to get a 64bit os, i the following days we release 1.1 this is 64bit, also 1.0876 can use double ram or more on a 64bit os.

[stefan]

p.s you can set vray to use less mamory in the vray system tab.

see
http://www.vrayc4d.com/manual/render_settings_system.htm
for that. it will get slower then but take less ram;-)
good for old 32bit systems

cheers
stefan

[chalk]

Awesome! thanks stefan :)

And what about the Mac users out there? You would suffer the same fate?

[celfcreative]

Like Stefan said, its more a 32bit vs 64bit thing than Mac vs PC.
Macs running 32bit apps can only use a bit more ram - 4Gb per app, and yes Cinema can run out of memory in 32bit-mode OSX just the same.
In full 64bit both Cinema on both OS's can access all the ram you can fit in the machine, currently 32Gb (? It is on a Mac Pro anyway)

[chalk]

Interesting stuff!

I tried tweakig a few of those settings in the vray system tab but it didn't really seem to make any difference to the amount of memory this scene was using. I did manage to fix it by re-organising my scene a bit and noticed that i'd accidently duplicated a few things.......... which didn't help much..!! oops

[Vitos]

And, from what I've noticed, 32bit OS X Cinema can easily handle big textures. On 2Gb systems, mac's can render 10k x 10x texture while windows mashines print out an error. But that's what celfcreative pointed out, a little more available RAM.

[stefan]

yes macs have better memory management.
xp64 is slightly faster in rendering and cpu usage.

big differences on graphic cards, osx doesnt like many objects in viewport, but is fatser than xp with few objects.

cheers
stefan