I was building up a scene adding new stuff when I came across this. After I'd added a new character the scene wouldn't do a superfly render on the GPU, it stopped immediately with a blank render. It rendered on the CPU with no problems. Once this happened reloading an old scene which used to work had the same problem. The only way I can get GPU rendering working again is to exit Poser and start it again.

The log for the failed GPU render had the error messaqe :

21:26:30 - SuperFly: Illegal address in CUDA queue copy_from_device (integrator_shade_surface integrator_sorted_paths_array prefix_sum)

Is this due to running out of VRAM? I've got a GTX 1050 Ti that only has 4GB. The scene I am working on uses the Colony Hive set by coflek-gnorg and it has one Victoria 4, one Mike 4 and one LaFemme, each with clothes and hair, plus a couple of Poser 4 Lo Res figures lurking in the background and a few props. Is this too much for this graphics card?

Hello,

To better answer your question, the team on https://support.posersoftware.com/ would be able to tell you for sure whether or not this is a system issue or software issue. 

Please let me know if you have any questions about using our support ticket system.

I have had the same issue and I have a 1080ti with 11Gb on board with just one figure and a couple of props.  In my case it has always been traced back to a problem with using older content so I would suspect Poser 4 content might be and issue.  As I found out in an earlier thread today, once you have had a CUDA failure you will need to restart Poser before you can do any more GPU renders.

Most likely would be a material is "wrong." I've gotten these crashes before. A material node is plugged in somewhere it's not supposed to be for GPU rendering, usually OPTIX is the issue. Yes, you have to re-start Poser to do any more GPU renders as you've just crashed your video card. Then you have to figure out what material made OPTIX crash and change that material. I don't get many of these crashes anymore because I just replace the shaders that come with store bought products before I do any rendering.

I get a blank but usually no crash if scene is just too complex for my ageing twin GPU cards. Dialling back their preferred 1024 vols+buckets progressively, I get to 64, which is also the CPU-only setting for both this CAD_Tower and the network-render 'Box'...

For example, this scene was still unstable at 64 v+b with the GPU cards, so I ran CPU-only, 96 pixel-samples, in ~ 1¼ hours on 'Box'. Currently running a 256 p-s, which I've just stopped by to check on queue's progress ~80%...

Lamps are budget DS set ported to OBJ+MTL. Frame is Poser primitive cylinder, multplicated, scaled etc.

Hooks from https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/84438/simple-hook-primitive

I've tried removing different items from the scene and I found that everything in the scene will render on the GPU but not all of it together. I've tried lowering the bucket size to 16 and switching off progressive render but that doesn't help. The only causes I can think of are that the scene is too big for the graphics card or there is some combination of items that conflict in some way and don't work together but I can't be bothered to go through different combinations of stuff to check this.

I suppose I just have to accept that my rather old computer is a bit limited when using the latest software. It is useable, I can render on the CPU, it just takes longer.

"Too big for the graphic card"
Not sure, I mean: long ago, I had a GTX960 if I'm not wrong. At the time, the video card could manage 2 Vic4's, but only one with clothes... Once, I tried to make the second wear something: the video card didn't crash, neither did Poser, just the "Nah... too heavy for me" kind-of message.

@peter_wade That illegal address error is a bug. We're currently hunting that one down. It would help us isolate the bug and make sure it's fixed if you could open a support ticket and attach the scene.

Please create a ticket here: https://support.posersoftware.com/

You can create a scene collection by using the File > Export > Save for sharing ...  That will create a zip file that included the scene and all the assets used by the scene. If the zip file is too big to attach to the support ticket we'll set up a link to send in the files.

This will help us make Poser better.

For a little background on GPU rendering: If a GPU render fails the device needs to be reset before Poser can render to it again. This requires Poser be restarted. If you're getting blank gray renders after a GPU render fails. Exit and restart poser to reset the GPU.

Scenes that are too big can cause this to happen. All the assets (textures and geometry) for a scene need to fit into the GPU memory all at once. GPU's can't do memory swapping the way a CPU can.That's why CPU renders have a much higher capacity for large scenes. That and most systems have much more main memory than dedicated GPU memory.

So how much GPU memory do you need? Roughly 2 GB for each figure in a scene. But, that's all subject to the exact figure. If you're using a character that has a bunch of 4K textures it will need more than 2 GB per figure. Clothes count as a figure too. Less than an actual figure but still probably 1 GB for each clothing item.

Reducing the bucket size and disabling progressive rendering on GPU will save about 200 MB on the GPU memory. So if the scene almost fits that may be enough to squeeze it in.

Other stuff running takes up some of the GPU memory too. If you're trying to maximize the GPU memory for a render close all the windows you're not using. Web browsers and anything the displays pictures will be the biggest RAM pigs. Rendering in the Render Queue will allow you to close Poser too. That will free up even more GPU memory.

What about dual GPU's? Yes but not what you were hoping for. The FireFly implementation of Cycles does use multiple GPUs. But, the entire scene must fit in each GPU's memory. So 2 8GB GPUs won't let you render a 16 GB scene. 8 GB will still be the limit.

Do any of these failed renders involve scatter volumes?

Mason41 posted at 9:24 PM Wed, 12 April 2023 - #4461988

Do any of these failed renders involve scatter volumes?

I don't think so. I haven't created any, I don't know how to. The set I am using doesn't have any atmospheric effects but I don't know how to identify a scatter volume if there is one.

Thank you, Thank you Nerd, for this 'inside' info.

Could some thought be given to an 'engineering' console for Poser  ?

Even as a $$ stand-alone app that monitors what parts of Poser are using what resource ??

Windows' 'Task Manager' can be frustratingly generic...

Depending on how your scene is set up, props and figures that are delegated to background filler don't need complicated material shaders.  Keep it as simplistic as possible.

If you check the log, in addition to listing how long the render took, it also shows how much memory is being used. I never noticed that before but I read Nerd's comment, thought it would be helpful to know your actual memory usage, and then decided to look at the log before making a comment about it. Lo and behold!

My current scene has two figures, clothes, props and scenery for around 7500 MB.

If you use a lot of figures, you can also cheat and reuse textures. For example no one will notice if you use the same maps for the inner mouth and teeth on all your figures.

ChromeStar posted at 10:49 PM Thu, 13 April 2023 - #4462116

If you check the log, in addition to listing how long the render took, it also shows how much memory is being used. I never noticed that before but I read Nerd's comment, thought it would be helpful to know your actual memory usage, and then decided to look at the log before making a comment about it. Lo and behold!

My current scene has two figures, clothes, props and scenery for around 7500 MB.

If you use a lot of figures, you can also cheat and reuse textures. For example no one will notice if you use the same maps for the inner mouth and teeth on all your figures.

Re-using textures sounds like a good idea but if you have two figures using the same texture does Poser load the texture just once or does it load it for each figure? And if it does re-use it, does this work if you have different material settings that use the same texture maps? One of my ideas for dealing with complex scenes is to have every character using the same texture maps but adjust the material settings to make them look different. This wouldn't be much good for closeup portraits but if you have enough going on in the scene it might not be that obvious.

Figures with different material settings will work, the only things that are shared are the texture maps.  There are various ways to change skin tones between characters, you need to find the least effective way without straining your system.

hborre posted at 7:48 PM Thu, 13 April 2023 - #4462105

Depending on how your scene is set up, props and figures that are delegated to background filler don't need complicated material shaders.  Keep it as simplistic as possible.

One can also render background characters and use them as a background or as a layer with an alpha channel for compositing.  I remember, years ago, one person managed to get I can't remember how many figures into a scene by doing a few at a time and compositing layers together.  It was some fantastic number: a hundred or perhaps even a thousand.  Either one was well beyond the capacity at the time and probably still is. (I've never been that ambitious, and I don't have a GPU that is Poser-compatible in the first place.)

I also had CUDA errors stopping my GPU from rendering in Poser 13. This issue seem to have been solved bij installing version 13.1.469

Playing with a high-poly OBJ+MTL (>50 MB file) scene ported from Skyrim, I found 'Dunstad Fort' with surrounds and auto-loaded TGA textures, its Alpha channels extracted to JPG then hand-applied, LaFemme wearing 'combats', her budget DS SnoCat crawler (!!) were just too much for this PC's now-ageing twin GPU cards...

So, test-rendered (5~~10) pixel samples, Superfly, progressive) using CPU, then sent 64 pixel-sample jobs to network render 'Box'...

Note original combination was1524 x 2875  Pixels (4.38 MPixels) (0.53)