Been getting CUDA errors lately with Cycles

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#1

Hi guys

I was hoping somebody could enlighten me a bit on this. I’ve noticed in the past month that Blender’s been giving me CUDA errors whenever I try to render out my scene with Cycles w/ GPU:

http://i.imgur.com/I9nTEvX.png
I9nTEvX.png747×45

This appears to be purely an issue with CUDA since I get this error even with the default scene with the cube and all. If I switch from GPU to CPU all is fine. But as soon as I try to preview/render the scene with GPU, I get the above mentioned error.

I am using currently “blender-2.65-r54370-win64” on a Windows 7 machine. The error has been around for the past couple of versions, cannot really tell the exact time it begun. Could it be something with my nVidia drivers, maybe? Here are the specs of my GPU/drivers:

http://i.imgur.com/XXug4MN.png

If anyone has any clue of what to do in order to fix this problem, I’d be more than glad to hear it! Thanks!

#2

I highly doubt that. My card has CUDA support and it had worked flawlessly before. It’d be weird for the devs to suddenly cut out the support for certain devices… if that even were possible. And if they did, I’m sure they would’ve mentioned that in the release info.

To me it seems like a bug in the code that prevents CUDA for working me.

#3

We still support sm_13 GPUs, but not sure for how long. Already today, those cards only allow to run half the feature set of Cycles, compared to Fermi/Kepler cards.

#4

Your card has CUDA version 1.3, which has limitations on what it can be used for in Blender. You need a CUDA version 2 GPU. Your GPU will most likely work in some cases and some version of Blender, and not in others. Sorry. (Besides, when I did a test on an old GTX-260 that I had lying around, I found it to be substantially slower than an old Core2Duo CPU).

#5

I was looking for this link earlier (from the Blender 2.6 manual), and now I found it: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering

To quote quickly:
Missing Features with Shader Model 1.xDue to limitations of the hardware, compiling a kernel with all features enabled is not possible for these cards. Currently missing are:

  • Transparent Shadows
  • Sample as Lamp for World textures
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Render Passes
  • Motion Blur
#6

Thanks for that link Olesk.

I knew there was a reason 2.0 was recommended but have never had the time to look up exactly why that was.

I shall add it to my list of links for answering these types of questions in the future.

#7

I saw your post on the other thread about that. Working up a reply for it. Going to put the post there to keep topics together.