Why does Max 2009 use a lot more RAM than previous versions

[Dave Buckley]

We have been testing Max 2009 Design on our computers and we are not having much luck with it.

We have fully updated it with patches. But the problem we are finding is that it uses to much ram.

Max 2009 is using almost 150mb more ram than Max 9. This may not seem much but our render farm can’t handle that increase in memory usage as it’s pushing the renders just past the 2.8 GB Ram usage, we then find they crash as XP32 bit cant use more than 3gb of ram.

Is there anyway to drop the Max 2009 ram usage or turn some of the new features off?

[lecameleon]

One reason would be DirectX viewport rendering I guess... uses a fairly good amount of RAM. If you switch to OpenGL you might reduce the RAM usage but probably have reduced viewport quality. But I am sure your problem is something else... since you mention render farms and higher RAM usage. Maybe you could stop loading some startup scripts or plugins that may be taking up too much resource... Just my thoughts.. maybe there are other solutions as well.. Ciao

[Brian Smith]

well it's always going to increase whenever they add more features and therefore more .dll files. i'm not sure why that's a surprise. 150mb over the course of 2 releases...seems logical to me.

i guess you could delete some of these files from the stdplugs folder

[Fran]

What happens if you disable View Cube and Steering Wheel? Also, have you tested to see if "Max 2009" uses less memory than "Max Design 2009"? If you use a 3rd party renderer, such as Vray, there is little of use to you in the Design extension.

[Dave Buckley]

here are my computer specs for the render farms, surely they should be handling the renders, it just isn't liable to upgrade these machines as they are far more than the reccommended requirements

They are 3 different render farms as follows:-
Manager=Pentium 4 3.6, 3GB RAM, 12.6GB free disk, FX1400 GPU
9 PCs in farm are Quad Core, 4GB RAM, 8GB+ free disk, FX1500 or FX1700 GPU
1 PC in farm is Dual Core, 4GB RAM, 11.5GB free disk, FX1500 GPU

Manager = P4 3.0, 1GB RAM, 6.2GB free disk, FX1100 GPU
12 PCs in farm are P4 3.4, 4GB RAM, loads of disk, FX1500 GPU
2 PCs in farm are Dual Core, 4GB RAM, loads of disk. FX1500 GPU

The third farm is the 64 bit PC on its own with Quad Core 8GB RAM, oodles of disk and FX1700 GPU.


The important points to note are that everything works fine with 3ds Max 9 and problems are only experienced with 2009 (testing with same scene in both). The guys have been watching the Task Manger and noted that with v9 the memory usage on a PC levels out at around 2.7GB but with v2009 the usage continues to grow above 2.7GB until the system crashes. All PCS have the 3GB switch set with USERVA=3150 and the swap file set to 6000 max and min on the Quad core PCs. Although single core P4 sounds old and useless they are good single cores and they work fine with v9 and Solid Edge with massive models. The same problems are on both farms and it is not realistic to expect customers to have higher spec workstations than the quad cores we have. Since it works fine with v9 I do not believe it is a hardware issue or a specification issue. Since the Quad Cores are up to date PCs it would be very poor if v2009 says it wants higher spec and why should it need more memory than v9. That would amount to Autodesk saying something like “you can do this nice new effect but you have to convert to 64bit with more memory just to run whether you use this effect or not”. NOT ACCEPTABLE. Much like Windows Vista and isn’t that received well .

They have checked for and installed all available updates. This appears to be a poor memory management issue with 2009. Please investigate whether similar issues have been reported elsewhere or are known to Autodesk and what solution there is.

[Fran]

So, you don't really know how much the scenes are actually using since Max crashes when it reaches its limit. Have you enabled Bitmap Paging in the Preferences dialog?

What renderer are you using?

[erickdt]

What happens if you disable View Cube and Steering Wheel?

Agreed, disable that stupid POS viewcub thing. I was having all sorts of issues with MAX 2009 64bit until I called tech support who told me to delete the viewcube GUI file all together. He was saying that almost all problems with MAX's viewport rendering are a direct result of the viewcube...

[Cocytus09]

How do you disable the View Cube and Steering Wheel?

I've noticed more crashes in my scenes since I upgraded to 2009, and have to rely on lowering polycount and lowering values in my render settings...

[erickdt]

How do you disable the View Cube and Steering Wheel?

I've noticed more crashes in my scenes since I upgraded to 2009, and have to rely on lowering polycount and lowering values in my render settings...

I forget where exactly it is. I was on the phone with tech support who can be reached here: 1-877-347-2733

The tech walked me through (no pun intended) deleting the viewcube gui file which immediately worked to prevent MAX from crashing every 15 minutes or so.

Good Luck!

[BrianKitts]

The last hotfix corrected the problems with the viewcube that made it crash max. But as mentioned it is a memory hog, so to completely remove it so max doesn't load it (as opposed to just turning it off)

- Open the folder.... C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2009\stdplugs

- Rename the file AutoCamMax.gup to AutoCamMax.gup.bak
(in case you want to put it back later)

- Restart max