Is Bryce Large Address Aware or not?
StuartB
Posts: 596
I've been led to believe it is, but today I read this over at Renderosity.
32 bit programs, such as Bryce, can only use 2GB of RAM, there is a cheat available if your software is Large Address Aware, Bryce is not, nor can it be made to be without a major rewrite of the software.
It's in the 8th entry down the page.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2883883
Now I'm confused. Is there a way to tell if LAA is actually making a difference when used with Bryce.
:-(
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Bryce can be made LAA http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/
@StuartB4 - this is correct, Bryce is not Large Address Aware, which means the flag was not set at compile time. However, it can be set using one of the free tools available - check chohole's link and/or watch the video Bryce Memory Shortage – and what you can do about it..
Thanks Chohole and Horo.
I have been using it since I found out about it here when I first joined the forum.
It just made me wonder.
I don't know how you would be able to set up this test without a lot of luck, however I had a scene I was working on that started causing some Bryce problem (I assume a crash or error on startup or when going to texture shaded mode, but don't remember for sure anymore). After trying to access the scene a few times with the same error, I installed LAA at that point, at which point the problem went away and I was able to continue working on my scene. So it would appear that LAA does in fact make a difference. If you could find a way to keep adding things, perhaps images for textures since we know those hog memory, until it just barely breaks due to running out of memory, you might be able to replicate this test and fix.
I don't know how you would be able to set up this test without a lot of luck, however I had a scene I was working on that started causing some Bryce problem (I assume a crash or error on startup or when going to texture shaded mode, but don't remember for sure anymore). After trying to access the scene a few times with the same error, I installed LAA at that point, at which point the problem went away and I was able to continue working on my scene. So it would appear that LAA does in fact make a difference. If you could find a way to keep adding things, perhaps images for textures since we know those hog memory, until it just barely breaks due to running out of memory, you might be able to replicate this test and fix.
Such has been my experience, I hit the limit in Bryce with a source file that was weighing in at around the 250mb mark, though it's difficult to predict what that might decompress to in memory. At this point I started to run into crashing due to running out of memory. I made Bryce LAA and was about to continue beyond that point.
How does Bryce compute the amount of space your scene is using? Is it the number of polygons? How does complexity of texture weigh in? Does it help to convert groups to boolean?
I'm not alone on this. I know I speak for many visitors to this forum:
I hang on every word out of you. I don't care if it has nothing to do with what I'm working on or plan on working, I know it's Bryce Gospel. I sometimes save your text, just in case I need it in the future. Please don't make a stranger of yourself. I know you have other things on your plate, but as long as Bryce is even just a side dish, we love hearing what you say.
@Sean Riesch - the best test is to use a memory intensive object, then ctr-c it. If you get an out of memory than you know you hit the ceiling. Then make Bryce large address aware and repeat it. If it works, you know LAA made a difference. That's how I "proved" it in my video. Running the Process Monitor with Bryce shows exactly how much memory Bryce - and only Bryce - uses. It is easy to prove that without LAA you get to 2 GB (or near it) and with LAA to around 3.5 GB.
@asterlil - Bryce uses memory according to the complexity of meshes and image resolution. You cannot deduce the memory used for a scene by looking at the saved br7 file because this is compressed. I'm not sure converting a boolean group to a single mesh would release memory. The Process Monitor will can show it. I suggest to run Process Monitor always when working on an elaborate scene. The Task Manager shows the memory usage of the computer, not only a program. And running the Task Manager may block certain options in Bryce (it does for me).
I'm not alone on this. I know I speak for many visitors to this forum:
I hang on every word out of you. I don't care if it has nothing to do with what I'm working on or plan on working, I know it's Bryce Gospel. I sometimes save your text, just in case I need it in the future. Please don't make a stranger of yourself. I know you have other things on your plate, but as long as Bryce is even just a side dish, we love hearing what you say.
Well that's kind of you to say so. Just summer can be a bit hectic. For example I started to word an answer to this this morning only to be called away by the local Cinema because he thought his aircon had gone on the fritz. I'd been there prior at midnight faffing with one of the HD's in his server. And the rest of the week had been given over to a random but somewhat all encompassing plumbing task. It's just been one thing after another. Friday my plans were scotched because the armature in my poor old circular saw burned out, so there's that to fix and my dishwasher has given up the ghost. One thing after another. But don't worry, when I get the chance, I've got plenty of things I want to experiment with in Bryce and ideas to try with Wings... just need to attend to my day jobs first. For which I advise, Makita for power tools, Wera for screwdrivers, Knippex for side cutters, Fluke for test equipment and Dewalt for wearable work gear. I could also bore you with tales of multi-tools (Leatherman, Gerber, Blackhawk) and flashlights (Fenix). Gear carrying? Maxpedition. And so on.
@David, yah, well, it's still thing-fixing weather innit. ;-) I'm still working my way through your tutorial videos and hope I'll be ready for more by the time you come in out of the cold.
@Horo, thanks for your comprehensive answer. I wondered about the convert-to-Boolean strategy because I had noticed that you can have so many objects that suddenly they don't all show up on the drop-down list. Doing a CTB where feasible generally solves the problem. And I did see how high-res materials could slow down render time, but hadn't realized this figured into memory loss too.
Is there a solution for older Mac´s? On my old G4, this was never a problem. I only had crashes with the blues images here. On my G5 everything with loading images is fine, but this "Out of memory"-thingy kills me. And pleazzze, can someone tells me in German, my head explode with my poor english knowlede.
@Black-Carrie - I cannot help, I don't know the Mac good enough (stopped at OS 6.7).
Ich kann hier bedauerlicherweise nicht helfen, ich kenne den Mac nicht gut genug. Hörte bei OS 6.7 auf.
Nevermind, but thank you for the reply. Under older OS, there was a possibility, to free up more memory for programms.
We do have a Mac nerd on the CV team, but unfortunately he is not available at the moment. I will ask him to come over here as soon as he returns
@Black-Carrie
What version of Mac OS X are you using and how much RAM do you have in the machine?
Google German: "Welche Version von Mac OS X verwenden Sie und wie viel RAM Sie in der Maschine?"
@ Totte
Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5, 6 GB DDR SDRAM, Version 10.5.8. This is the one with memory-leak.
Dual 867 MHz PowerPC G4, 2 GB DDR SDRAM, Version 10.5.8. This is the one without memory-leak.
Thank you for your help.
The main difference between those boxes is that even though the G4 was "dual processor", there was a bug in the memory controller that prevented the CPUs from accessing memory in parallell. That was fixed in the G5 memory controller that Apple developed together with AMD (based on the AMD Opteron memory controller). Even IBM used that memory controller in their PPC970 based servers.
So from your problem description I more guess there is a memory race condition causing the crash. Are you sure it's "leaking", i.e. the allocations are keep increasing until running out of memory (checking with activity monitor or is it as I guess, a race condition causing the allocation routines to simply fail and Bryce interprets that as a Error -108 (out of memory)?
Oh, my bad english. The G4 loaded everything in Bryce, I had millions of polygons and more. The "Heart of the matter" from Lisa loads over DAZ-Bridge without any problems. Doing the same with the G5 and I get the 108-Out of memory-thingy. Another strange thing is, the blueish Picture-Import, that crashes Bryce is only on the G4, one the G5 Bryce can load any image without any problems.
Tomorrow I will check, what the activity-monitore tells me on both macs. It is really late in germany :) I only noticed, that Bryce gets more and more wonky on G5, the more I imported, deleted and so one. It tells me textures are missing, loads without some props, and then I know, next action will give me this damm "Out of memory" and it gives me this warning not only once, it gives me this over and over and over, and I have to quit Bryce with the rude methode.
I know, I'm in the same timezone ;-)
Lol:-)
Perhaps, it is a solution, setting up my scenes on the G4 and open it on the G5 to render, the rendertimes on G4 are incredible loooong and loud ;)
Sounds like a good solution. Can be that the Bryce Bridge in DAZ Studio works different on the G5 than the G4 (different CPU). The G5 is also very picky with structures data alignment but that is mostly a performance issue. The reason I know "a lot" about the G5 is that I did attend a special 4 day "Optimizing your code for G5" seminar at Apple in 2003 (time files).
Thank you, I will try!
Not really happy with the old G5, so many restrictions. So many things, that you can only change over terminal, which really frighten me. Bryce is a really great and I love all of it´s possibilities. Hope, they will get a fix someday.