DR Render issue

[mi75]

I'm hopping someone can shed some light on my problem.

 

I wanted to re-render an old file because I wanted to replace a few wood textures with my new Arroway woods I bought. I've never had an issue with DR before, until now.

 

The second PC is an i7 920, which shows 8 buckets plus the 4 buckets from my quad core, making 12 buckets. The render starts fine and shows all 12 buckets and both CPU's are running at 100%. Halfway through the render the i7 PC starts to drop buckets and fluctuates between about 4-7 buckets and the CPU drops down to between about 50-80%.

 

I checked the Vray logs and nothing seemed wrong.

I checked all the texture paths, and all are fine

I then did a test render with a basic benchmark scene and everything works fine, both at 100%.

 

Anyone have any suggestions on what might be causing the problem.

 

EDIT

 

Problem solved!

- The problem was the material Filtering

For some reason I had Diffuse + Reflect + Bump all set to Summed Area Filtering. I left Diffuse as Summed Area Filtering but returned the reflect and bump to Pyramidal Filtering and the problem was solved, render time was reduced as you'd expect but no buckets where dropped and both PC CPU's stayed at 100% Usage for the entire render

Edited July 23, 2009 by mi75

[WAcky]

yeah summed area filtering has the biggest memory load. 4x higher than none as I remember.

 

It was probably eating up all your memory forcing your pc to start swapping data from your ram to the HDD which explains the drop in CPU load.

 

Good to hear you fixed it.

 

edit: Just realized I'm telling you stuff that's in the big black book you own

Edited July 23, 2009 by WAcky

[danb4026]

I never played around with filtering...could you explain the differences?