Iray render crashes after updating to DS 4.21
tom.rowlandson.1727
Posts: 6
The renderer crashes every time I try (using a scene that worked perfectly yesterday...), even after repeated reboots and attempts to change settings (CPU only, GPU only, both CPU and GPU etc). My machine is a laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX3060 laptop GPU with 6 GB dedicated memory and the latest Nvidia studio drivers, a machine and a driver that has worked perfectly until updating to DS 4.21.
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How about a simple sphere primitive (Craete>New Primitive) in an empty scene?
Which driver? Some users seem to be having issues with dForce here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/595976/deforce-broken-on-nvidia-driver-522-25#latest
@Richard Haseltine: I've had no problems at all with my current GPU driver, which I installed about a month ago, always working properly with both dForce and rendering, so that's not where the problem is. From what I can see, after extensive testing today, it's a problem with how DS 4.21 handles GPU memory when rendering, or more specifically how much GPU memory it uses/needs when rendering. Before updating to DS 4.21 I could have a large scene loaded and visible in DS, even when making a render of only a small part of it, with those parts of the scene that weren't visible in the render not affecting how much GPU memory DS would use/need, but now, after updating to DS 4.21, I have to hide literally everything that isn't needed for the render, or the renderer will crash. And it will use/need all of the 6 GB of dedicated GPU memory that I have even when rendering a very simple scene with a single character and just a few small props.
Which version of DS were you using before updating to DS 4.21?
6GB's of VRAM is not much, practical minimum with relatively recent DAZ store assets would be 8GB's
Further tests (now with Nvidia's Game Ready driver, version 522.25) shows that DS 4.21 doesn't release GPU memory after finishing a render, requiring a restart of DS, plus several minutes of waiting for GPU memory to be released by the system, and then reloading the scene, before making a second render. Problems I've never had before.
And still further tests show that it's after having made an Iray-preview of a render in the viewport that DS 4.21 won't release GPU memory, so when I try to make a full render of the scene I just previewed DS forces a CPU render, with a much longer render time, since it's still holding, but apparently not using, all the GPU memory it had used during the viewport preview (in addition to using much more GPU memory than DS 4.2 did), and the only way to get it to release the GPU memory is to close DS, wait a few minutes and then open DS again, etc..
Game ready 522.25 breaks dforce for me.
That's a shame as it has optimizations that were seeing me get about 10% more performance in games, it's also the 4090 launch driver so any problems with it may get rolled into the studio drivers.
Not releasing memory at all without a restart sounds like Iray running out of memory.
Which leads us to the real problem: DS 4.21 using/needing much more GPU memory than DS 4.2 did (for the exact same scenes), a problem that I can't be the only one experiencing. Solved by making DS 4.21 as "memory friendly" as DS 4.2, and/or making sure it releases memory in a user friendly way after hitting its head against the ceiling.
It is Iray behaviour that you are seeeing. Iray is written by nVidia, Daz has no control over it.
DS 4.21 using/needing much more GPU memory than DS 4.2 for the exact same scene can hardly be Nvidia's fault. :)
Never the less, Daz has no control over Iray and the issus you are seeing are Iray/driver.
There has never been a DS 4.2, the version numbering jumped from 4.1.0.95 to 4.5.0.1 and that was some 10 years ago.
It was of course a typo, or perhaps subconscious abbreviation of 4.20, and a quite common one too, since there even here on the DAZ forums are several other people who have also referred to it as "4.2"...
I have now installed and tried progressively older Nvidia drivers, and have found that the Nvidia v516.40 driver (but not the v517.40) seems to use less GPU memory, and also seems to release GPU memory the way it should, so I guess it's a better match for the Iray version used in DAZ Studio...
UPDATE: Unfortunately DS 4.21 still doesn't release GPU memory after making Iray previews in the viewport, regardless of driver version (tested with Nvidia's drivers v522.25, v517,40 and v516.40), as DS 4.20 did with all three driver versions, making it a DAZ problem, not an Nvidia problem. You can make a series of renders without problem, but as soon as you've made an Iray preview in the viewport your GPU memory is locked, and you won't get it back until youv'e done a restart of DS, with a few minutes wait between closing DS and opening it again, because it takes a while before DS closes the last process, and releases the GPU memory.
UPDATE #2: ... and it doesn't release GPU-memory after a dForce-simulation either, which 4.20 did, with all three of the Nvidia driver versions I listed above.
Do you provide download links for DS 4.20 so we can revert back?
4.21 crashes non-stop and I cannot even make a 50 iteration preview render.
Having same problem as discussed above. And, this is Daz 4.21 Pro.
Follow up to my comment above. Removed all clothing from model and it rendered fine. Added different dForce clothing and it also rendered fine. Seems that one particular piece of dForce clothing was causing the crash.
I'm having the same issue after updating
The only way to revert back to an older version of DS, is that one has saved the installation files for that older version oneself.
8GB Not enough? Try 24GB P40 Tesla in a server running 384GB of mem.
Having the same issue on 4.21. I run a 24GB P40 on 516.95 NVidia Datacenter Drivers.
Simple 1 object scene. it still crashes.
Love to roll back to 4.20, that had no problem on the same drives.
Or, since once DAZ is installed it pretty much becomes "portable," COPY and rename your current install folder, so you still have your plugins, and let the new version get installed in the default location. I have the current and previuous versions of both the general release and beta releases on my drive.
I've the same problem as tom.rowlandson.1727. With 4.2 everything worked now (4.21) it is just annoying.
I think 4.21 reintroduced the .tif bug.
Certain tif files were crashing Studio a few versions ago.
I just tested with a clothing item that I know uses tif files for the normal maps and I can crash Studio 4.21 100% of the time by either starting the iray preview or a render.
Version 4.12.1.117 (old beta) doesn't crash with the same clothes and tif maps.
I do remember though that this product received an update to fix this so I'm not sure what changed with the handling of tif files in 4.21.
If you remove the tif files, or convert them to png the crash doesn't happen.
Will need a couple more people to test this to see if they are getting the same thing.
But, that has to be done before installing the new version.
I am getting the iray preview crash as well. Feels good to know I'm not the only one.
Oh thank goodness. I also thought this was just me.
I am having exactly the same issue. Scenes previously rendered without any problem now simply crash when trying to use iray preview.
Same here...tried 2 diiffrent nvidia drivers...tried the 4.21 beta as well...but it is crasing in iray preview after a few sec
GTX3090 on a Ryzen3900X 12 cores
Daz 4.21, studio driver 517.40 (latest breaks dforce), 2070S 8GB - same issue - renders that worked in the past no longer work.
I seem to have this problem too. Tested with Titan RTX and 3090 (both 24GB VRAM), and Studio Driver 517.40 and 526.98 (latest one at the time of the post, dForce not broken anymore). Scenes that just about made it in the prior release do not render and crash to desktop on DAZ Public Beta 4.21.1.13.
However I didn't need to revert all the way to 4.20.1.78 Beta, instead 4.21.0.5 Beta works just fine.
So in my case at least, it wasn't specific to 4.21. If anyone can try an earlier version of 4.21 and see if it works, that may help confirm if I'm experiencing the same thing as others in this thread.
Edit: Removing some figures/items from the scene in 4.21.1.13 Beta also allows the render to complete, but I can't render the same scene as-is from 4.21.0.5 Beta. So it may indeed by a VRAM management issue.
Edit 2: The items I removed could have removed offending .tif textures also, in which case it may not have been only a VRAM issue if IceCrMn is right.