"Fatal GPU error occurred"

[michael_grosberg]

I'm rendering a 2000 frame image sequence, using Arnold GPU rendeering on 3ds max 2021 and the most up to date version of Arnold, After about 350 frames that rendered successfully, I stopped the render to do something else on the same machine. Later, when I restarted the render, arnold started outputting completely black frames, each taking 2 seconds. I examined the render log, and it said: "Fatal GPU error occurred, please restart the host application".

I restarted my computer but the same problem is still occurring. CPU render for this file is taking forever and isn't a viable option. Is there anything I can do? what could be the issue?

Additional information:

My machine is a brand new i7/9700 with 16gb ram and an RTX 2060 super GPU.

This issue only happens in one, quite resource-heavy, scene. Other, simpler files render just fine. The scene contains about a 1M polys, thousands of objects and lots and lots of textures (all of them in TIFF format) but no procedurals, materials are both physical and standard surface. nothing more complex than an editable poly - no volumetrics, fluids, or anything of that kind.

[lee_griggs]

Do you get the same error if you disable the textures (Feature Overrides)?

Can you share any images/details about the scene that could be causing it to render so slowly with CPU (including sampling settings)?

[michael_grosberg · Accepted solution]

Problem solved (so far, cross fingers, knock on wood) - on a hunch, I decided to convert all of the textures used in the project to dds, as they take up 16/th of the memory footprint in the video card.

I wonder if there's some defect with my video card, or with Arnold's memry management function, or what.

[lee_griggs]

dds?

Were you not converting the textures to .tx first?