3ds Max + Vray CPU usage

[jair_gh]

Good morning everyone,

 

I am sure there are people around having the same issue as me. I have noticed in a recent project that vray uses 100% CPU power when doing a rendering with override material enabled. However, when the render with the same settings is run, the CPU consumption oscillates between 40 and 60%, never reaching 100% during any part of the rendering process. It actually seems to me the speed is related with the materials. I await for your comments and I hope any of you helps to solve this problem and optimize the use of my resources.

[siddharthkolte]

I have never had this happen. Whenever I render the CPU usage shoots to 100% everytime.

 

I think it might have to do with the setting "Low Priority" checked on in your Render settings. I usually keep that off as I don't work simultaneously to the render.

[jair_gh]

I have read through several forums and I made sure I am not working on low priority. As I said, it only happens when I assign materials.

[branskyj]

What happens if you render a brand new scene with applied default grey vray material?

Have you disable the HT of your CPU through your BIOS by any chance?

[ismailrebbane]

Hi Jair Gal,

What's you're Dynamic memory limit value?

 

In all cases try to make it to a value of " 0 ", as if it's by defaut " 400 " - the renderer will suffer "a lot",

 

With a value of 0, it will use all RAM while loading geo maps etc.

 

hope that helps,

cheers,

Ismail

[juanpugliese]

Hi Jair Gal and forum, I am currently going through the same thing. I realized rendering times were going up ridiculously, in our newest workstation. This might be a problem with these newer vray updates that tend to throttle the cpu (around 30% permanent usage) with certain map combinations. I ticked "override materials" and found CPU went back to 100% usage while rendering. I then started excluding, one by one, each material to see which ones were causing the problem. I ended up isolating a couple of materials that use rather HiRes maps for diffuse, reflection, glossiness and bump (like a shiny wall cover), and tried turning on each map separately. They only cause the problem when they are all switched on at the same time. This is rather intriguing, not to mention annoying. The specs are a 4770k with 16Gb Ram, and should be more than ok to handle these kind of simple interior scenes.

Still can't figure out how to make the materials to work the same way I have always made them. But at least I found the source of my problem. If anyone finds out what to do in these cases, we are gonna be really grateful.

 

Good luck and keep posting! I am sure we must not be the only ones with this problem.

 

Juan.

[jasonstewart]

My guess is that textures are swapping in and out of RAM. Increase Dynamic Memory limit or 0 as Ismail suggested to use all of it. In the status box it will give some indication that it is swapping and it will take forever to render.

[jair_gh]

As Juan did, I disabled textures one by one but in complex scenes is not an effective way to find the problem. I did play with the dynamic memory limit, I changed the quality and size of the images, the format to jpeg and never managed to solve it. I even laid on the "merge the geometry into a completely new scene" technique and nothing. Up today remains an unsolved mystery for me. Luckily only happened with that project and it has not repeated... so far.

[scottfolts1]

I recently had a similar problem (low cpu usage). After much testing, isolating, tweeking, etc; I finally found the culprit to be a bad photometric .ies file. No idea why, but after switching, all was fine. That was w/ max 2015 + vray 3.

Not related to materials, but worth a test.