rendering has slowed down on my fastest machine

[nicholaspapageorgiou]

Hi Guys

 

Can anyone help me with this? i recently installed an nvidia tesla C2050 card into my system. The system a dual opteron 6274 with 16 gigs of ram. Before that everything rendered fine and fast but now the system hangs at certain points for some seconds and a final vray render has jumped from 4 hours to 25 hours? I have two other machines and they are all rendering the same file at around 4-5 hours so its nothing to do with the file itself? I really dont know how to troubleshoot this. Ive checked that everything is working fine. no memory chip errors and no problems with overheating? could it be the tesla card?

 

thanks

 

nick

[Jason Matthews]

What video card did you previously have? May be a power supply issue. I don't know how much juice the tesla takes, but it may be more than your PS can handle. Just a thought. I have no evidence to show this.

[nicholaspapageorgiou]

hey jason

 

i had a gaming card in there before as a temp before my tesla arrived, think it was a gtx 550..i also have a 1000 watt power supply so should be more than adequate to hand all the hardware

 

its certanly done something to affect 3d max? This is gonna sound stupid but is vray somehow using the cards gpu to render off rather than my cpu's? could this slow the process down? the tesla c2050 is not as new as some other tesla cards

[Jason Matthews]

Well that is certainly a large enough PS. No, Vray does not use the graphics card unless in RT mode where it is specified.

 

As much of a pain as it is, have you swapped cards to see if this fixes the problem? If it does, I have no idea what the issue could be.

 

Have you checked your memory limits inside of Vray? i.e. dynamic memory usage instead of static, large enough memory specified?

 

Are the CPUs running 100 percent? I have had issues with some scenes in which one day they will render fine (100% utilization) and another day they just seem to hang (10% to 20% utilization). In that case, it may be coincidence that the you replaced the graphics card.

[nicholaspapageorgiou]

thanks jason, yea the next step is to put the old graphics card in and see if that helps.

dynamic memory is fine. it renders the same scene on my core i7 980x machine in 4 hours tops and that has only 8 gig of ram..

 

Everything else like working around the scene/movement, saving is really fast its just rendering? very strange?

 

will keep you posted

[Jason Matthews]

Hmm. May be that ghost in the machine after all. They only way I am able to ever fix the issue of the CPUs not running at 100% on the rendering is to redo the scene, which in many cases is the worst case scenario. Yes, please keep us posted.

[Dimitris Tolios]

Lots of Greek folks around...

 

The PSU sounds enough to handle almost 2x what you have hooked to it.

Have you tried drivers? Rolling back or re-installing the nVidia drivers could change something that causes some malfunction with your 3D suite, as I cannot cannot connect this to a hardware issue as both GTX and Tesla should not affect CPU renderings at all...

[nicholaspapageorgiou]

hi

 

Thanks for the advice. Actually i tried re-installing the drivers of the tesla card and this is where it starts getting wierd. my light cache calculation phase and iridescence have returned to normal but the actual render time is still really long? also it hangs during those initial phases of calculation and doesnt smoothly run through them (it still works but looks like it crashes)

so the next step is completely remove the card i think!

[Jason Matthews]

It kind of sounds like either there is not enough RAM and the scene is loading and unloading geometry or it is having trouble finding the bitmaps and is delayed. I know you have a lot of RAM, but check the rendering dialog box anyways. See if it gives you that message as it is rendering. Also, just for a belts and suspenders type of approach, check your system resources to ensure that you are not at your RAM limit. Again, I know you have enough RAM, but check anyways. One of the RAM sticks may have been dislodged from the motherboard when you put the card in and the system doesn't see the extra stick.

 

Where are the maps that the model is loading? Are they on a different machine or on the workstation? Just curious.

[nicholaspapageorgiou]

hi jason, sorry for the late reply. long day in front of a happy computer doing visuals.

actually do i really have a lot of ram? 16 gig for a total of 32 cores is probably not enough? (ok not proper cores, amd ones, but even so!)

 

everything in the system points to no ram problems. my test file is using around 4 gig, my processor cores are working at there max, no vray messages or resource problems. i havent got around to taking the card out yet but it really pains me. the card was soooo expensive. I may go for the fools approach and keep throwing money at it and hope it works...64 gig of quad core ram at 1600 should help..also maybe a quadro 4000 card and the tesla in the background doing cuda tasks...

[nicholaspapageorgiou]

the maps are loading from the same machine. max is running from a solid state where i have windows and programs installed and i work from an old school mechanical 2 gig hard disk for my files..

 

one thing i havent mentioned is that the 16 gig of ram i have installed is supposed to run at 1600 speed but my bios is reading it only at 1333. This is something to do with my motherboard needing to be updated as the new amd opteron 6200 chips can take faster memory speeds where as the old 6100's cant. could this be a factor?