The Poser Dev Team is pleased to announce that Poser 12.0.703 is available for download.

Release article: https://www.posersoftware.com/article/538/poser-update-poser-120703-improves-usability-and-material-room-performance
Full release notes and download links: https://www.posersoftware.com/downloads

This is a free update for anyone with a Poser 12 license.

That's great news.

I've just read the release TXT file, and it doesn't seem to list any update on those RTX crashes that occurs sometimes. Is there any news?

Checking with support/testing folks.  Will let you know.

Checking with support/testing folks.  Will let you know.

Thank you guys, I'm happy to hear the news!

It's got a collapsable hierarchy! Thanks so much for that!

@Y-Phil unfortunately, we have not been able to resolve the specific RTX crash during render you mentioned here and in your support ticket.  It occurs deep in the Cycles code.  The good news is that Stefan Werner has rejoined the dev team.  He is a Cycles expert and is working on updating Poser's Cycles & Optix to latest stable version.

Yeah, my current scene is still giving those CUDA errors during Optix renders too (even in the new version). Fortunately they work OK as non-Optix GPU renders, so it's not as bad as having to resort to CPU rendering.

I didn't look at the collapsible hierarchy yet but that sounds great. Also sounds like some of the material room issues are resolved.

@Tim thank you for the good news.

@ChromeStar I've remarked that we can lower the risk of crash with cycles-based material during an rtx-based render by being sure that every character is unimesh and by being sure that nothing seems to cross, this last point being particularly true with the hairs. Unfortunately, some hairs still seem to have wrong geometries or errors in it. I suppose that this is where the rtx-based renders are crashing.

Hi,

I just installed the update but there seems to be something off with the Area lights rendering.

The scene rendered in P12:

The same scene rendered in P11 (lighting as I would expect it):

Did something change in the update regarding the use if Area Lights? (even if I turn up the intensity to 1000% the scene becomes barely lighter). I am using the 'Low Branched' preset in both P12 and P11

You'll need to make sure nothing has changed and if you can test drive other scenes in both versions, submit a ticket.  Sometimes the techs will break something while fixing something else.  Maybe if someone else notices a difference, they can verify the problem.

Sorry, can't reproduce; tested with single area light, one figure and dome in P11 and P12 and apart from the fact that Low Branched produces horrible artifacts (fireflies) and graininess, I see no difference in light strength at all.

P11:

P12:

It's got a collapsable hierarchy! Thanks so much for that!

Loving the update.  There is an odd problem I am having.  In the Purchasing tab, it says that the new purchases are installed as I'd directed ... but nothing shows in the runtimes even after a refresh, I've had to manually install since .703. 

Trying to render with Optix:GPU on an RTX 3070 Ti gives nothing but failed renders. After a few seconds of 'Loading render kernals' it briefly flashes what seems to say a COMPILE_ERROR but it doesn't output this to the Log screen so it's difficult to give the full version of the error code. It even fails to render a basic scene consisting of only the Construct and one of the default Poser Superfly Lights sets. No figures or shapes. Odd thing is, it worked once or twice after installing the latest version, even on more complex scenes, but for whatever reason it hasn't since. Clearing the Optix cache in Appdata\Nvidia hasn't changed anything.

Non-Optix GPU renders work fine.

Trying to render with Optix:GPU on an RTX 3070 Ti gives nothing but failed renders. After a few seconds of 'Loading render kernals' it briefly flashes what seems to say a COMPILE_ERROR but it doesn't output this to the Log screen so it's difficult to give the full version of the error code. It even fails to render a basic scene consisting of only the Construct and one of the default Poser Superfly Lights sets. No figures or shapes. Odd thing is, it worked once or twice after installing the latest version, even on more complex scenes, but for whatever reason it hasn't since. Clearing the Optix cache in Appdata\Nvidia hasn't changed anything.

Non-Optix GPU renders work fine.

I have a ticked filed at the support  that concerns the weird crashes in RTX mode. That doesn't depend on your card because I've an old RTX2080Ti. It seems that it's deeply hiding in the Cycles engine when it's related to the RTX mode.
I know that they have enrolled a Cycles expert, and they count on his expertise to enhance and correct those hiding bugs...

From what I've obsersed:

* Cycles needs Unimesh
* Some hair props seem to make the RTX render crash, even recent ones
* Sometimes, upscaling or moving the hair prop seem to correct the problem, but it's not always the case
* it looks like sometimes when two objects are intersecting, it crashes, sometimes  not

I'm not at all technically qualified to say, but I doubt the issues are the same. Running the latest Poser version 12.0.703 with Nvidia driver 496.13 it simply fails all Optix renders. I'm starting to doubt it worked before (and that I wasn't just using the normal GPU render), as I now can't get any scene to render in Optix, even with nothing in it other than a simple Ball shape and one light.

Helpfully, today Poser is writing the error to the Log file whereas it didn't yesterday. The part where the render fails is the same each time:

SuperFly: OptiX error OPTIX_ERROR_INTERNAL_COMPILER_ERROR in optixModuleCreateFromPTX(context, &module_options, &pipeline_options, ptx_data.data(), ptx_data.size(), nullptr, 0, &optix_module), line 411

It's always line 411. The same error, other than the line number, appeared in the Blender bug reports early last year: https://developer.blender.org/T73533

It was suggested there to clear the cache from Appdata\Nvidia\OptixCache, but as with the person who added said bug report, it didn't result in any changes here in Poser either. Reinstalling both Poser and the Nvidia drivers has not changed anything either.

100% Cycles (both are unimesh), rendered using the RTX mode, but I am not using the standard nvidia driver: I'm using only the Studio versions. They come out less often and seem to be more stable. Actually: v472.12

That being said, you have indeed stumbled upon another error compared to me and I think (if it's not already the case) that you should file a ticket...

Trying to render with Optix:GPU on an RTX 3070 Ti gives nothing but failed renders. After a few seconds of 'Loading render kernals' it briefly flashes what seems to say a COMPILE_ERROR but it doesn't output this to the Log screen so it's difficult to give the full version of the error code. It even fails to render a basic scene consisting of only the Construct and one of the default Poser Superfly Lights sets. No figures or shapes. Odd thing is, it worked once or twice after installing the latest version, even on more complex scenes, but for whatever reason it hasn't since. Clearing the Optix cache in Appdata\Nvidia hasn't changed anything.

Non-Optix GPU renders work fine.

Y-Phil posted at 8:45 AM Sat, 23 October 2021 - #4429294

I am not using the standard nvidia driver: I'm using only the Studio versions. They come out less often and seem to be more stable. Actually: v472.12

In fact, I've tried to throw the most complex scenes I can find at it and so far it hasn't had any issue rendering the scenes.

I remember an article I read online, I think that it was 2, maybe 3 years ago concerning the performance of the studio drivers, especially when it comes to games, and the guy stated that the difference was really minimal.

Whatever lol... I don't have enough free time to explore 100% of Poser, so that the online games are for me more like another galaxy than another world... 😁

I have an RTX 3070 with Studio Drivers. I've had a couple of those crashes - render stops to a gray screen after having just started. None yet with the newest Poser version, but they were rare to begin with, so I can't know for sure.

I know with the CUDA errors, once the error occurs, all subsequent renders will also fail. But closing Poser and restarting it will reset that. So you could have scenes/frames that render just fine with Optix, but when you try to render them after an error it appears they don't work, because the original error has not been reset yet. The majority of what I'm doing (typically cycles, superfly) works just fine with Optix, a smaller proportion of scenes will fail typically only for a few angles and need to be rendered without Optix.

And I have encountered the following case: an hair prop, which its Cycles-material setup was causing the RTX-crash all of a sudden being rendered without crashing simply because I lowered its render SubD level down to 0....

I know this isn't always the case, but it's better to check it.

I upgraded to Windows11. I've only upgraded the OS and haven't changed Poser 12.0.703 and NVIDIA driver 472.39.
On Windows11, Multi-Device rendering doesn't seem to work properly.
Multiple cards are correctly recognized, but it seems that only one is used in the rendering.
It worked fine on Windows10 before the upgrade.
Curiously, Poser 11.3.818 works fine on Windows11.
Is it a problem in my environment? Or is it a known issue?

On Windows11, Multi-Device rendering doesn't seem to work properly.
Multiple cards are correctly recognized, but it seems that only one is used in the rendering.