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OT: W10 October 2018 and VRAM Hogging

ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
edited October 2018 in The Commons

For some reason I decided to download the W10 update today, the same day it was released. Go no, right? I never, ever download updates for anything until everyone has had a chance to debug them first. But this time I did. Not sure why, but anyway....

So I installed it, uneventfully, then downloaded and installed the latest NVIDIA drivers, uneventfully, and then downloaded and installed the latest CUDA 10 Toolkit for my Visual Studio. And all seems to work fine. 

My plan was to run my little CUDA app that directly checks available VRAM on my GPU(s), and then fills whatever is available. It worked fine with the previous versions of everything, so I assumed it would be a quick test. 

So I re-compiled my app and ran it, and it looks like the VRAM limitation of 81% is still there. But what's strange is my simple, one line of code to grab ("allocate") all of that no longer works, and throws an error no matter how much I try to grab. So something's goofy, but I doubt I'll chase it. 

Now I have no clue if there's some detail I'm missing, but at least at this point all the talk of the new W10 October 2018 being a ray tracing animal don't seem to have affected the VRAM allocation stuff with my existing 1080ti or 1070 cards. I'm hoping there might be a setting somewhere deep in CUDA 10 that allows you to tweak the limit, but I guess I'll wait to see what others find.  

Post edited by ebergerly on

Comments

  • TSasha SmithTSasha Smith Posts: 27,432

    I do not have my “good” computer with me so not trying to update “old” computer at this time.

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679

    The Windows update adds the ray tracing API to DirectX 12. That doesn't really have anything to do with Iray as far as I know, and I wouldn't expect them to do anything about VRAM allocation.

    If you can find a way to hack TCC on to a GTX card, you would fix the VRAM issue. However, Nvidia has pretty much locked their GPUs down now. Back in the day you could flash the firmware on a GTX card and unlock Quadro features. No more. Source for that last bit comes from GamersNexus. I don't recall the exact video where he discussed this. It may have been the 1030 DDR video. Otherwise, you can always ask. They have a group of experts who can answer these kinds of questions. They even have a guy who does graphic design to answer those kinds of questions. You should watch the ray tracing breakdown video they did, its very good.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,830

    Well I think iRay Renderer or DAZ Studio or Windows 10 has an alloc bug or at least it's the case when I do many DAZ Stidio iRay renders whether optimized for Memory or Speed, my SSD available free space will shrink & shrink & shrink because of DS taking Windows 10 swap I'm pretty sure. Example, over the last 5 days I did maybe 6 iRay renders and my SSD free space shrank from about 30GB to 8GB! It's 223GB fomatted total so not huge but really having to reboot everytime one uses DAZ Studio is not ideal. Anyway, a reboot takes the free space on the SSD back up to about 30GB.

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    edited October 2018
    Did you change your pagefile.sys settings? Thats under Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> Performance (click on settings next to it) -> Advanced -> Under "Virtual Memory" click "Change", or something like that. The default should be ok. And search your HD for pagefile.sys and see if its a gazillion gigabytes.
    Post edited by ebergerly on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,830
    ebergerly said:
    Did you change your pagefile.sys settings? Thats under Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> Performance (click on settings next to it) -> Advanced -> Under "Virtual Memory" click "Change", or something like that. The default should be ok. And search your HD for pagefile.sys and see if its a gazillion gigabytes.

    No, I haven't changed it. I automatically allows Windows to manage it. It starts out at a minimum of 2926 MB and is currently 6476 MB (I've ran a few 1280x1280 iRay renders) and apparently the system disk capacity free space is the limit it will claim if I repeatly iRay render without reboot. It allocs in 16MB increments minimum.

    I guess I should buy a 1TB SSD (or a 2TB is they ever get to be cheap enough) and let it be. I'll reboot more in the mean time.  

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679

    I used to have a nearly full 500GB SSD and I don't recall running into this. I upgraded to a 1TB because I did not want to wear out my SSD. Running a SSD near full capacity can shorten its lifespan. This is because of how SSD shifts data around the drive. SSD's last longer these days in large part because of how they optimize for this. By moving data around the drive, it allows the sectors to evenly distribute wear. However, if the drive is nearly full, it prevents this process from working like it should because there is no room to move the data around. So it is recommeded to buy as large a drive as you can to avoid filling it up too full. It is possible if you run a drive over 90% full, it might die in less than 2 years. Running at 80% doubles the life, but thats still less than 4 years.

    Here is a really good video that discusses SSD life expectancy is detail along with other facets of SSD tech. In general, normal use is fine. And of course, back up important data regardless.

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