Iray suddenly reverted to CPU only - help!
AiRen-Irin-Malachy
Posts: 21
Hi everyone!
Hopefully someone on better speaking terms to all things techie and Iray here will be able to stop me tearing my hear out.
I've just started tinkering with Iray here and there, keeping the scenes small and simple until I find my feet. Until a few days ago it worked without a glitch. Then on a recent test render I've noticed it went painfully slow, even for my puny little excuse of a card in a garden variety family PC. Glancing quickly at the temperature monitoring thingamejig in the tool bar it showed CPU sweating at its customary 52C in full render mode, while GPU chilling out at breezy 23 C - it usually goes to 48-49 soon after the render starts.
I checked the devices in the advanced rendering - tab - checked. I checked that the scene fitted the RAM - it did ( the GPU has 4GB to fill up anyway, so a couple of primitives and Sun-Sky should not be a bother.) All drivers are up to date, installed via Nvidia Experience console as they get released.
I checked the DS log, and yep, it says GPU device failed.
I'm at a total loss - everything seems to be normal, everything showing nice and in order, and no matter what I try Iray won't play. I've attached the screenshots, hopefully smarter folks than me can figure out what's going on and how to fix it - I've tried everything I could think of and I am currently at the banging my head on the desk stage...
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Comments
Sometimes the driver just crashes. Occasionally you can get things back into shape by quitting and restarting D|S, but usually you have to reboot your machine.
Also, turn off the Pixel Filter Enable. It's only for renders you intend to cut short before pixels fully converge (the salt-and-pepper noise look). It's probably not causing this error, but despite it optimistic name, the filter does its thing only at the early stages of the render.
The timeout errors are another issue. There are ways to lengthen the delay before Windows considers the display driver stalled out -- by default it's just a matter of a few seconds. Before getting to that, see if a clean boot helps.
Also try just using the graphics card. uncheck the cpu in Advanced tab to test that mode.
Make sure you have the latest nvidia driver.
It reverts to cpu when not enough memory on the gfx card too. The 630 only has either 1 or 2GB. And it is only GDDR3 if it's 2GB, could be GDDR 3 or 5 if one. A CPU could actually be quicker, although it would need to be close to cutting edge. What's interesting is the 630 shows as having 4096MB in the image you posted, they were not made with so much. They have 100ish to 390ish cuda cores, depending on the model - example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0084LE1XY?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
There doesn't seem to be anything on your report image that matches the specs for the card you are using.
http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gt-630/specifications
First, thank you all for taking time to help - I truly appreciate it. Now to the points raised:
1. Restarted DS - the issue persisted.
2. Restarted PC - see above.
3. Checked drivers, all up to date and installed OK.
4. The card is now discontinued, but it's this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127684
5. Tried the GPU only option - no joy (see attachment). Christ, if I have to wait until I can save for a half-decent GTX jobbie to render anything more than the sphere on a plane, I'll be beyond miserable for quite some time
...
Try resetting the render preferences. this happened to me once when I was monkeying with render settings, in particualr bloom filters and crush blacks. I think there are combos of the setting that freak out my card, maybe yours too. I reset preferences (which reset all those settings to default) and everything worked again okay.
In addition to resetting the rendering tab, which is always a good idea, the error you seem to be having is that Windows gets a GPU timeout before rendering can begin.
If you're not also getting TDR timeout errors (these are popups that generally result in D|S also closing), one possible problem may be a bit of geometry or a shader that louses things up. You might try totally re-creating your scene,
GPU-Z is showing 4GB RAM, so unless that program is misreading your card, I think you have enough memory for this job.
For lurkers: You can never go solely by nVidia's specs. nVidia licenses chip sets, and it's to individual manufacturers (Asus, EVGA, etc.) to build whatever features into the card they want. Amazon, Newegg, and others sell an MSI version of the 630 with 4GB.
I see your screenshot says it is doing "interactive" usage. Do you have that set and going in render mode? Try "photoreal" instead if it is to test.
Iray sometimes uses the same terms for multiple but separate things. This particular warning is issued when using a CUDA-capable card that's also connected to the monitor -- "interactive" here means the card is performing both ,display and render-engine. You get this message in Photoreal mode, and it's separate from Interactive mode.
It's got 96 cuda cores; I'd stop wasting your time, you're not going to see anything particularly good out of it, although it could be faster than your cpu, depending on what it is.
A GTX 950 as an example, and costing a little over £/$100 has 750; it wont be anything like cutting edge, even though it has close to eight times as many cores; and from the most recent generation.
What's your cpu? How much memory has your computer got?
Is the gfx card used for display as well? It seems so, but please confirm.
Thank you, guys, really appreciate it.
Will try to reset render preferences when I get home today (I don't recall fiddling with it lately, but since I am still at the early learning Iray stage when a lot of what I do is of the 'Oh, a tab - I wonder what it does - lets click it and hide behind the sofa', it's quite possible I messed something up without being aware of it.)
Yeah, :sigh:, I know my card is lousy (saving for the GTX 970 4GB, can pick one brand new for around £220 here), but even so has been helping with the render times, about 20-30 mins gain on a 3.5 hrs render. I always render in photoreal mode.
Yes, the card is connected to the monitor. The CPU is a 3-year-old i7-3770K, modest 8 GB RAM (will be 16GB form next month).
The problem appeared a few days ago around the same time when one of those 'lets see what this does' bright moments of mine led me to clicking for the first time on Nvida Draw Style from the draw styles tab (as opposed to my usual 'Texture Shaded'). The scene was with one V7 with Beautiful Skins product applied, Zoey hair and 3 mesh lights. The viewport went into a spasm, and the auxilliary window at the top right where I expected to se a mini Iray render remained unchanged - no Iray render preview. I just switched back to the my usual Texture Shaded draw style and promptly forgot all about it until now. I think the crash and DS closing happened around then, but I cannot be sure.
This might be just one of those dumb coincidences, but then could have I messed up something royally that started the CPU-only render problem?
Changing then reverting the Draw styles shouldn't have permanently caused damage, but as I noted above, you should reboot after any GPU errors, especially those popups.
I have a few scenes that after one or two renders will crash both of my GPUs. There's something in the scene that does it -- bad geometry or a shader that Iray accepts for CPU rendering, but the graphics cards don't like. From this point, and after rebotting, try a brand new scene with basic geometry, the default "Ruins HDRi, and standard IrayUber shaders. If it still doesn't work, your driver may have gotten trashed, or something in the D|S installation needs to be reinstalled, and/or your card decided to take early retirement.
I took all the suggestions onboard (once again, many thanks to you all) and after several hours of fiddling with this and that, this is where I am now:
1. uninstalled DS, then re-installed - just in case.
2. Render Settings tab left at default, pixel filter off, quality 1, etc.
3. started with the sphere/plane scene with supplied Ruins HDR, then swapped with Sun/Sky - no problem with either renders.
4. opened one of my finished Iray scenes from June (V6, M6, that famous Pixar studios HDR, bloom filter enabled) - no problem.
5. re-created the scene from scratch where the issue showed up - first V7, then 3 mesh lights, rendered, then added Beautiful Skin preset, rendered again, then Tolouse Hair, rendered again - no problem..
6. Replaced Tolouse hair with Zoey Hair... aaaaand the Iray chucked the GPU out, switched to CPU only after about a few seconds of hesitation - see the log detail attached. It seems to start with both devices, but then GPU gets terminated ('launch timed out and was terminated while launching CUDA renderer') and voila - CPU only.
I have no idea why would the time-out at the beginning be successfully prevented in all other scenes (according to the log), but few seconds into a render with Zoey Hair in - GPU is out.
Stumped. Not the foggiest idea.
Since you've narrowed it down to the hair, it could be geometry, or could be textures. You can do a fresh boot, load the scene, and take all the textures out. You should end up with a "clay" render, a render with just the geometry of the hair, but no textures applied.
If the problem still happens, then there's an issue with the geometry. I see it now and then, and without a deeper error message, there's no telling what about the geometry that your GPU doesn't like. If the problem goes away, it's the textures, but fortunately, you can replace those fairly easily. I use Slosh's UHT Iray hair product, available on the Daz store. I believe it's better than the similar product available at Rendo. The replacement Iray textures should work as long as it's not micromesh hair.
Well, after testing it as suggested, it appears that whatever texture gets applied to Zoey Hair, Iray decides to time-out the device launch, and proceeds with CPU only. Hair without texture - both rendering devices work. Anything else added to the hair - CPU only.
Oh, well - it looks like Zoey will have to render snail pace CPU until I saved enough for a reasonably OK GPU.
At least I now know what's the problem - thanks to everyone who helped, saved me hours of banging my head on the desk and feeling a total dunce
.
Slosh's very excellent UHT Iray hair retexturizer, available in the shop here, doesn't use any of the original hair textures. This might be an alternative for you. In looking up Zoey Hair, I see the same vendor does that hair, as well as his (her?) own Iray texturing product (which I also have, and used for a time). There may be something in that texture, such as a trans map, that is upsetting Iray on your system.
Save the scene.
save the scene with a new name.
delete the hair.
render - although if you're sure it is the hair no need to.
load new hair
render
save scene
save scene with new name
apply shaders to the hair that you want
save scene
render
saving with differnet names, lets you revert when something goes wrong. I just itterate through numbers after the name I decided on when I'm trying to track an error.