I have a machine with a pretty powerful (?) graphics card, the EVGA Geforce GTX 580 Classified. The system is an i7 running 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 (the latest LTS).
It essentially works, and gives me “the power of cycles” except that… often when I render animations, it seems the card must get hot or something because after a while, every other frame partially loads and I end up with only a few tiles in a single frame rendered. Normally, this goes on every few frames or so, but I’m left with flickery footage and a handful of frames which need to be rerendered individually. This is very time consuming?
What’s the cause of this? Is it a blender / cycles bug (are others experiencing it) or could my card be faulty? It has no problem running something like Crysis on windows and only seems to fail when I get it to work substantially, like with an animation. I’m wondering whether it might be caused by my setting tilesize to 256 (which is faster for singe frames) butam yet to fully test lower chunk sizes.
Can plug up an example of the kind of file which it chokes on if needed.
We experience this aswell… theres a few reasons for it that i can find so far.
first one is graphics card timeout… not sure if linux effects it at all, or how to change it if there is it there… but if the graphics card doesnt respond to windows within a certain amount of time, it kills the process it was working on… so complex scenes under windows can sometimes crash… not sure if ubuntu has this same problem but look into it
the other reason is it kills the process if it gets too hot, if you can bump up the fans on your graphics card.
the last reason i know about is if you are using the computer at the same time, this ‘could’ mean that you use up too much ram for your normal usage… so at rendertime it runs out of ram.
Thanks for your feedback. It’s great to hear that it’s not just me getting this. I’d searched around without finding others mentioning the issue and thought maybe I lucked out with a faulty card, so I can now at least be happy that isn’t the case.
I’ve tried smaller tile size and I think this does make a difference, although the smaller sizes are very much slower. It had me wondering whether I was still using the GPU. Probably a key is to get the balance. If 256x256 tiles are speedy but loose too many frames, whereas 64x64 seems to work but is terribly slow… something in between? I wonder if I have to follow the powers of two size rule (e.g. use multiples of 8) making the optimal sizes exclusively 64x64, 128x128 or 256x256?
Given the specs of the GTX 580 Classified, RAM shouldn’t be an issue and I’d imagine it should be able to handle running hot, although the temperature does seem to be a factor; the frames are only lost once the card has been working a small while.