iRay buggy on Mac?

Three Wishes

Hi, 

I have a 27" iMac, late 2013, 32 Gb RAM. The video is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M, 4gig of VRAM.   Up-to-date CUDA drivers (7.5.21), and, um, 1536 CUDA cores (iirc). I'm running El Capitan 10.11.1. 

If I do a series of iRay renders, and particularly if I interrupt one or more, at some point my global graphics context becomes corrupted. It'll be anything from rectangular regions flashing on different parts of my screen to a hard lockup or sudden reboot of my system. 

Is anybody else experiencing this?  My suspicion is that it's a driver problem and not necessarily something that DAZ can do anything about.  Right now I'm just looking for helpful clues. 

Thanks!

- dan

 

 

mjc1016

Those symptoms are typical of overheating or driver problems...and with the rebooting, I'm leaning more toward driver issues. (although they can also be early warnings to power supply problems, too...especially the rebooting...)

Three Wishes

mjc1016 said:

Those symptoms are typical of overheating or driver problems...and with the rebooting, I'm leaning more toward driver issues. (although they can also be early warnings to power supply problems, too...especially the rebooting...)

Interesting. I know my machine does run hot when I'm doing IRay renders.  Hotter than when I'm doing much larger scenes in MODO.  Hmm...

Cris Palomino

On my Macbook Pro, I have an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M and the heat would shut the computer down.  Well, once, and when I found the heat sink problems, I switched to CPU to render my Iray stuff and, while obviously slower than my NVIDIA compadres, it does the trick till I can get a set up where heat won't hurt my computer.

StratDragon

dhtapp said:

Hi, 

I have a 27" iMac, late 2013, 32 Gb RAM. The video is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M, 4gig of VRAM.   Up-to-date CUDA drivers (7.5.21), and, um, 1536 CUDA cores (iirc). I'm running El Capitan 10.11.1. 

If I do a series of iRay renders, and particularly if I interrupt one or more, at some point my global graphics context becomes corrupted. It'll be anything from rectangular regions flashing on different parts of my screen to a hard lockup or sudden reboot of my system. 

Is anybody else experiencing this?  My suspicion is that it's a driver problem and not necessarily something that DAZ can do anything about.  Right now I'm just looking for helpful clues. 

Thanks!

- dan

 

 

try this if you have not already

http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cuda-7.5.20-driver.html

Three Wishes

I seem to have hit on a way to stabilize renders, although I'm still testing:  I've turned off CPU contributions and I'm rendering using GPU only. I'm not seeing much of a performance hit, so we'll see.

Three Wishes

Nope, no good.  Well, this is a bit of a disappointment. It appears the only safe way to use iRay for me atm is to run it CPU-only.  

Ostadan

Are you doing other things that might be using the graphics card?  I find that failure happens if I do something foolish like watching a video whilst rendering a moderately heavy scene.  But that may be superstition.  I haven't seen a crash in a while, though.

 

Three Wishes

Ostadan said:

Are you doing other things that might be using the graphics card?  I find that failure happens if I do something foolish like watching a video whilst rendering a moderately heavy scene.  But that may be superstition.  I haven't seen a crash in a while, though.

 

That's a good thought. I generally haven't been doing anything else at the moment, but I have a lot of other programs running (like Slack) that can grab a graphics context to play video without warning.  Later on, I'll try running some renders without any other apps open and see if I get a little cleaner performance.