Hello Folks,
I am learning quite a bit of stuff in these fourms and thanks to everyone involved in making this a good experience. I myself am new to view and enjoy the opinion and advice of senior more experienced gents/ladies in here :)

I have seen a few many posts lately regarding render issues especially with the newbie bunch and would like to clarify on the following points. I myself have vue xstrem, with a nvidia 8600 GT 256 Megs graphics card, nothing fancy but just to get by if I may call it that:

1. I was playing around with various senese and the render times are amazling long, infact I ran into 4 days of rendering and after the stand alone renderer had rendered 47% the computer shut down intermittenlty and stopped everything (dont konw if that was lack of memory or cpu got tired of rendering and calcualting, though I thought machines never tire ;) ) anyhow I have a 32 bit system with 4 GB of Ram but since its 32 it wont use any higher than 2 GB. The cpu temp were around 60 C for both cores (its an AMD athlon processeor). My understanding is that most of the renders vue does is through the CPU as opposed to the GPU which brings to mind the following suggestions and weather they would work or not :

A) is running vue any better on a 64 bit windows xp professional addition and using vue 64 bit
b) can a 64 bit vue run under windows 32 bit enviroment so that it can use the excess memory
c) what increasing the virtual memory help with the renders considerably?

I have seen some scattered advice on this above but unable to determine how to cut short the render time, or most importantly in my case stop vue for halting intermitently. I do not think vue xstream has a save render option so technically i cannot render again from the last render point after the computer restarts. Does this mean I gotta down grade to vue 6 infinate or something.

Thanks

A) You will get different opinions on this, I had no performance gain using 64 bit windows and more ram than I do over 32 bit, again some people will agree or disagree with that, but for ME there was hardly any difference.

B) No

C) Very unlikely

Hope that helps

Jon

Vue xStream is Vue Infinite with a plug-in, so you have Infinite.  

A 64 bit operating system will let you use all of your 4 GB, but Vista will gobble up at least 1 GB of that memory.  XP will use up to 2 GB per program, so in theory, Vue will have a full 2GB to use.  You can run another program in the background, and it should not impact Vue as much.  Still, 1 GB is hanging around unused with a 32 bit operating system...

You can't run a 64 bit program in a 32 bit environment. 

Rendering is based on processor speed.  At least 2 GB memory helps, more memory not that much of a difference. 

Is Vue crashing or is the computer halting?  If your computer is shutting down, look for overheating (add fans) or an overloaded power supply.  

Here is my tutorial on render settings.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/23774/tutorial/Vue-6-Infinite-Render-Settings

Ram is used to store all the data Vue needs to compute the render ( the textures, the objects, the lighting informations, the bump/displacemnt effects..., and all the apps and utilities that are needed to make your machine work, including Windows/Mac OS, and Vue of course), so the more you have, the less you'll get of memory error messages, but having more ram won't speed up the render ( it will a tiny bit only if your memory is slow), CPU power is the key.
Now the problem you ran too makes me think like Peggy, your machine might be overheating, or maybe there is a problem with your power supply.

Thanks guys, In response to the above answers

1. Regarding overheating, I usually monitor the core temps/.cpu temp and they seem to be in the 61-62 C range which I think is an acceptable range for the operating temps. Vue does not crash per se, its just that the whole system restarts.

2. I cannot seem to find the save render option, if there is such an option, so that I can resume my rendering from the last render % complete. That would help cause if the computer keeps crashing I can save and reload it from the last render %. But cannot seem to find or know how to go about doing it.

The funny thing is when the rendering reaches around 47 - 50% the computer decides to restart. If it were the temp, which are in the range above, the computer should restart at any given % complete.

regards

Quote - "I cannot seem to find the save render option, if there is such an option, so that I can resume my rendering from the last render % complete. That would help cause if the computer keeps crashing I can save and reload it from the last render %. But cannot seem to find or know how to go about doing it."

File -> Options -> General Preferences -> Render Options -> Generate resume render info.

If you check this, everytime you stop a running render, Vue will generate a resume render info which will use if you right click on the render button and click on "Resume Render". You can even shutdown Vue (click Yes when it asks you if you want to save changes or else resume render won't be available next time!) and the computer. When you open it again, the resume render info is still valid. You can not change anything in the scene or you won't be able to resume render.

If the computer crashes in the middle of the render, you will be able to resume render only from the last point when you last stopped it and saved the scene.

Quote - "The funny thing is when the rendering reaches around 47 - 50% the computer decides to restart. If it were the temp, which are in the range above, the computer should restart at any given % complete."

Hmmm... This is a bad sign. It could mean your scene is corrupt somehow. This has happened to me, some months ago. Something got corrupted and I had crashes when rendering. In order to pinpoint the exact material or object, I rendered in small areas. I found that whenever the area would contain a specific material, it would crash. I replaced the material and that was it.

Render crashes are also fairly common (in my experience) if you have complex objects made out of boolean operations or metablobs. It's convenient to bake them as soon as the object is finished (after saving a copy of the unbaked object if you want to change it later).

An important thing: make sure you are running the last software version!

61°C is indeed a fair temperature. I have made renders of several hours recently and monitored my CPU temperature at 64°C. It went on smoothly.

You may be interested in checking my Vue benchmarks. I have a dual Core Athlon (4600+) which I compared to an Intel Quad Core (Q9450). For my scene the Quad core is 73% faster than the Athlon.

Thanks guys,
Offrench,
I have gone through your benchmarks they seem quite well done, I am impressed with the core duo exterme systems.....unfortnately considering my budget I guess for the time being I will have to tug along with my amd 64 x2 athalon

rutra,
yeah I concur with you on explanation about corruption, there is a possiblity that the drawing might be corrupt. In which case I would have to re-edit stuff.

I am also wondering now that you brought it up, and it looks feasible enough, are people who are running low on rendering requriments or with slower processors using the 'save rendering option' to any successs. Considering if a cpu was being over heated as a result of higher processing, I believe saving the renders shutting the pc off for a day and then re-rendering it from the last % complete would help a vue user to ultimately render any complex drawing without hardware upgrade but certainly at the expense of time. Is that logical to assume and have people done that in practice.

Thanks

I stop and resume renders quite a lot. I had some renders recently that run 3-5 days because I wanted some big versions. I did not want to lose the whole render in the last 5 minutes.
Also, I often leave a render running at night or when I'm otherwise busy, but interrupt the render when I want to use Vue interactively on another project. Then resume render again at night.
It's also a good idea to save the image itself when you interrupt the render, so that even if the machine crashes you'll only need to redo the unsaved part and composite the parts in post work.

Only once when I resumed a render it skipped a row of pixels, but it was rescuable by rerendering just that thin strip and compositing in PS.

Resuming render is invaluable!

On large render image sizes:
I've had good luck saving render time by rendering only up to a moderate size (1,024 or 2,048), then increasing the size with the easy, fast and  amazing "Photozoom Pro" program. For me, no loss of quality up to 6,000 pixels across - could probably go higher still.

_jc  'Art Head Start' e-book: Learn digital art skills $19.95
'Art Head Start.com Free chapter, Vue tutorials, models, Web Tutorials Directory.

Here's something to try.  Try rendering your scene (the one that causes your system to restart) but render it in a smaller resolution.  For example, if you are currently rendering it in 1024x768 and at 47% of the render it poops out on you, try a resolution of 800x600.  It will render quicker but if it hits that 47% mark and does the same thing then also try it again in a smaller resolution.  If it keeps repeating the reboot process then something is wrong in your scene and it's not a heat issue because the 47% mark is reached much quicker in the smaller resolutions.

Also, try a different atmosphere and see what happens at the 47% mark.

Rutra, I need a bit more help with resume rendering, the options is checked ticked under the tabs as you specified. however I am not certain on how the process works.

When I right click on the render tab, which shows all the options for rendering, there resume render button no the botton right hand corner is greyed out. I am not very sure on how to access and apply this resume rendering option.

For instance, I am rendering a secene, in the stand alone renderer, how do I stop rendering it (are there any keys) and then how do I restart rendering it from the same point. I am trying to understand the process.

Thanks for the help !

Quote - *"When I right click on the render tab, which shows all the options for rendering, there resume render button no the botton right hand corner is greyed out. "

*Quote -  "For instance, I am rendering a secene, in the stand alone renderer, how do I stop rendering it (are there any keys) and then how do I restart rendering it from the same point."

I never use the standalone renderer so I don't have experience with it.  As far as I know, the Resume Render button in the Render Options window is not available with the standalone renderer. In the internal renderer, for the button to become available you need to a) set the option on, b) render something, c) stop render (by hitting the Esc button).
Note: The resume render option is not available if you are rendering in Preview mode.

In the standalone renderer there are built-in buttons to stop and resume render in the Batch Rendering window. However, I did a small experiment and the resume render in this window only works correctly if you don't restart Vue. If you do, the button is available but it doesn't really resume, it starts from the beginning. But again, I'm not experienced with the standalone renderer so I could be making some mistake.