Ram usage of DR Nodes

[CliveG]

Could someone explain how RAM is utilised with DR Render nodes?

 

It seems that when I utilise a large HDRI or complex displacement, that my render node is often not utilised at all, I keep an eye on the RAM usage on a node and it appears that if it get's to about 65 - 70% of total available on that node that the scene doesn't get passed to the node, no additional buckets appear on screen and little happens that wouldn't with DR switched off. There are no messages reported.

 

However if I switch displacement off or replace a large HDRI with a smaller one, everything works fine, IR info is sent to the nodes, buckets appear on screen and the render takes half the time it would do otherwise .

 

Is there a way to adjust the Dynamic Memory Limit on a DR Node? (I hope this isn't a dumb question!)

 

Or is it simply that having a smaller available RAM in my DR nodes is the bottleneck to effective DR distribution?

 

Cheers

[Nic H]

you need as much ram in ur nodes as the main workstation or it will not load dr buckets

[CliveG]

Jeez that's disappointing.

 

So as technology progresses my old render machines are effectively useless, rather than downgrading them to nodes.

 

My old i7 only has capability of 16G Ram but my new machine has a capacity of 96, subsequently I can't use my old machine as a DR render node to speed rendering of my stills. Worse, my old laptop has capacity of 4G, I may as well stick it in the bin then?

 

That seems dumb.

 

Surely there's something I can do with these to share their processing power whilst still using a 200mb HDRI and displacement in my scenes?

[numerobis]

They don't need to have the same amount of RAM like your workstation. But enough FREE memory that the whole scene will fit in at render time.

[Dimitris Tolios]

They don't need to have the same amount of RAM like your workstation. But enough FREE memory that the whole scene will fit in at render time.

This.

Also I think the RAM usage in nodes is slightly lower than that of the "master" machine, as those don't need to load and/or display the VFM window, which has pretty substantial requirements for larger scenes.