VRED RAM usage - Mac OS

[Anonymous]

Hello - I was hoping for some clarification on how VRED uses system RAM vs. graphics RAM.  

I have a 2017 iMac, 3.6GHZ i7 Quad Core (7th gen) with 32GM RAM, Radeon Pro 555 with 2GB video RAM

When I try to render frames at a modest 1024x768 I'm surprised at the lack of performance. The Activity Monitor shows that I have 32GB of physical memory available but only 8GB are being used. Is there any way to control this? Delegate more RAM to the app manually?

Thanks in advance.

Matthew

[marcus_fritzen]

Hi Matthew,

it would be good to know which VRED version and macOS you are using. About which frame rate are we talking? Which rendering mode?

RAM is important when it comes to scene size. If you are loading a small scene it is absolutely fine if VRED only uses a small amount of memory because there is not so much data it needs to display. However, if you have a large scene with a couple of hundert million triangles or with big environment maps, you will need a lot more memory.

If we are talking about rendering speed, the CPU and GPU is much more important. Unfortunately macOS is not really know for updating its GL versions very often and I don't think that they spent a lot of man power for the updates since there is Metal. That is the reason why we can't use latest features to get the best performance. We are constantly working on improvements but sometimes it is simply not possible to get the same speed on macOS as on Windows because of mentioned issues and problem with OpenGL.

Cheers,

Marcus

[Anonymous]

VRED Pro version 2018

Mac OS Sierra

Average frame rate 9.5

Triangles:  242,000

Full GI raytrace rendering

Super Sampling ON

1024 x 768

all other settings i believe are Default

see attachment.

Thanks for the reply!

Matthew

[marcus_fritzen]

Hi Matthew,

9,5 FPS for Full GI raytracing wouldn't be that bad 😉 but I doubt that you are using raytracing since the statistics shows the OpenGL ones.

Furthermore I think that the resolution is is larger than 1024x768 since the attached image is 2080x980 and the rendering fills almost the whole image and you are on a 4K iMac.

However, as I previously wrote, we needed to implement some things differently for macOS OpenGL rendering to get rid of rendering issues. We hope that we can improve that in the near future which would speed up the GL rendering on macOS.

Cheers,

Marcus