This is starting to be irritating, and I thought that maybe you guys might have a solution for it.
At school, the computers we use for rendering are Core 2 Duo's @ 2.4Ghz with 2g of Ram. We were using VIZ 2008 and MentalRay as the renderer. It was an intermediate graphics class, so some of our scenes were somewhat complex.
I just got a new computer at home, which I thought was going to exceed the performance of the ones I used at school. It is a i7 quad core at 2.6Ghz and 6g of ram. I'm only running 32bit Vista ultimate so I know I can't use all the ram, but in the least I thought my performance would be better than that of schools. I'm also using Max2009 and Vray as my renderer, which I also expected to be more efficient than mental ray.
The problem arrives that when i'm setting up even a rather normal scene, (attached) the buckets move extremely fast (2min for attached 800x600 example), but then it will just hard crash for no particular reason. At school, the buckets moved slow as molasses (sometimes taking students 12-15hr to complete a 1600x1200 rendering), but it had never hard crashed once on any of my projects nor my classmates. Is there some sort of setting that I am forgetting to check? I have plenty of time, so I don't mind the buckets taking longer, but it's frustrating to come back to see my rendering be almost done and then crash to the desktop.
In the scene, I have a displacement map on the grass closest to the camera, and a few lampposts and benches. I haven't even added my building, nor the trees. Max counts the faces at 35229 (
Thanks for your help!
ps. I also failed to mention that at school we had some generic Radeon card, and I am running a Radeon 4890. The memory has also passed memchecks and I can run new video games with ease, so i'm fairly certain that they are not corrupt.