Crash during render - Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave)

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1

Hi everyone. New to the forum, long time blender user.

Fellow Mac users, blender all of a sudden crashes during render. No solutions were found online, despite references to similar issues.

If someone has had this issue, lets discuss. Any feedback is much appreciated. Below are the details.

  • System and Blender

    • MacOS 10.14 (Mojave)
    • Tried with versions 3.1 and 3.4

  • Issue: Blender crashes half way during image render in the following manner:

    • Blender just crashes (W/o affecting anything else)
    • Blender crashes and freezes entire system
    • Whole system abruptly shuts down

  • Max cycles render settings w/o crashing - CPU or GPU doesn’t matter:

    • 1280x720 @ 256 samples
    • 640x480 @ 512 samples
    • Anything above 1280x720 (1080p+) or over 600 samples results in crash mid render
    • Less than half memory used

  • Background:

    • I only render stills (No animations or video)
    • Tested with three completely different scenes with completely different materials
    • Have had no such issue with blender on this system for 5 years
      • Used to be able to render anything, up to 4k @ 1024 samples, lots of lights, chrome, 8K HDRIs, PBR textures etc.
    • Left computer turned off and in storage for a year, started using again recently- no changes were made to the system
    • No issues with computer otherwise
    • Blender behaves normally otherwise

Thanks everyone! :smile:

2

Share the file?

3

Hi Joseph. It happens with ANY file. Including ones I ised to be able to render fine in the past.

4

Does it mean that the PC itself goes down? :thinking:

Wouldn’t it be a hardware problem?
Have you checked the temperature inside the PC?

5

I ran cinebench to see if such behavior occurs under any other load conditions. It was fine. Unfortunately I don’t have any other renderer or stress test software to continue testing.

6

What’s the hardware?

7

Simply blender colliding is a common problem, it could be a blender problem, or it could be a problem with the hardware.

However, if the whole system goes down, it could be a different problem. :thinking:

And I’m not sure exactly if cinebench can test GPU acceleration.
The version I used only had CPU tests.

Windows users can easily obtain the load test software they use to check for CPU or GPU defects.

Make sure you have similar software on your Mac.
※ Be careful because load testing can cause hardware damage.

8

9900k + radeon pro 580
Memory 32gb

9

Ill see what i can find. Maybe Ill try Houdini or something else and see if the render causes anything like this. Used to have maya but uninstalled

10

I had a similar problem, which caused heat generation due to poor hardware contact and caused the hardware protection circuit to operate, causing the system to shut down.

These problems accumulate little by little over a long period of time, and when they occur, it is difficult to find the cause. (More and more various errors occur.)

Most of the time, the problem is solved by replacing the suspected hardware, but sometimes it is not resolved because the underlying cause is unknown.

It took me a month to solve this problem.

The above mentioned issues cannot be said to be the same, but please also suspect hardware issues. :slightly_smiling_face:

11

Is this a Hackintosh?

A couple of thoughts:

  1. 99% of the time that I got weird crashes with any software it’s come down to permissions. Effectively the software needs to write certain temporary files to a certain folder and it’s denied to do so, causing a crash.

  2. Mojave is pretty old. I would consider updating to Monterey or higher. Lots has changed since 2018 and there have been a ton of optimizations and bug fixes. .

  3. That GPU is old and underpowered by most modern standards.

If you’re intending on staying in MacOS, I would highly recommend that you consider updating your machine, even a Mac mini M1 is bound to give you much better results.

1 Like
12

Yeah its bizzare because in the 5 years the machine has served me well (knock on wood) and continues to be a champ otherwise. Which is why Im baffled as to why now?

There are various threads on a similar topic, none of which are resolved, genuine OEM macs, not hackmacs:

I’m considering taking the thing for inspection but Im in the middle of a project I need to deliver ASAP. Maybe theres something going on. Im gonna try to do the work on my laptop for now hope it can handle it. I wanna try to load linux on the machine with blender and see if the problem persists. Hope I wont end up with a hardware bill to pay.

13

Thanks for the advice. What’s weird is that the exact same (fairly lightweight) scenes I have previously rendered crash as well. Scratching my head

I will go through the system and clear any cache/preference files for blender I can find and do a clean reinstall. Maybe that will help.