GPU rendering crash

Hi,
I just encountered a annoying problem. My graphics card crashes when i try to render a certain scene. I have rendered it before without any trouble. However, yesterday my motherboard broke, so i replaced it. It was the same brand, and nothing else changed. I have a Nvidia 660Ti OC card, and AMD cpu.

I can viewport render just fine, but when i try to F12 render, it gets to “copy to device” and then it crashes with a error message about “OpenGL lost connection with the device…time out exceeded”. Never had this before. Could switching out the motherboard do this? Will try and update those drivers now, updated the grapics card driver and blender, but it didn’t work…

Updating the motherboard drivers didn’t help either. Here’s the error message:

Attachments


I think your render required too much VRAM (a lot of textures or a complex scene) for your graphic card. You should try reducing she scale of your render tile.

Im not sure, my card has 2gb vram, and its only like 300k faces. Will try and just use some plain diffuse materials, and see if that helps.

Not sure where i can see exactly how vram it uses, but reducing it to simple materials worked. However, i was able to render this scene with just slightly simpler materials than what seems to crash my drivers now. =/

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering#The_NVIDIA_OpenGL_driver_lost_connection_with_the_display_driver

The NVIDIA OpenGL driver lost connection with the display driver… due to exceeding the Windows Time-Out limit and is unable to continue.If a GPU is used for both display and rendering, Windows has a limit on the time the GPU can do render computations. If you have a particularly heavy scene, Cycles can take up too much GPU time. Reducing Tile Size in the Performance panel may alleviate the issue, but the only real solution is to use separate graphics cards for display and rendering.

Okey, i changed the textures/materials a bit around, and that seemed to fix it. Thanks for the advice. However, after reducing them a bit, i added some other changes, so now it doesn’t seem a bit less complex than before. But i guess im pretty clueless about what is difficult to render and not. Is there any kind of guide to which nodes/image textures/types of scenes that are particularly heavy?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487368.aspx

Might be relevant to your os.

Eppo: Nah, i checked that, but couldn’t really make any of that work.

Something is wrong though. I can make a scene, save it, render it just fine. Then the next time i open it, and try to render it, without changing anything at all, blender/graphicscard crashes. =/

Might have to try and reinstall windows, just in case the motherboard & graphicscard switch messed something up

@Starzinger, I tried @Eppo’s solution and it worked. However this is not much better in term of render speed than just reducing the tile size.

Hmm, when i try to find those registry keys, they dont seem to be there. Does this work for Windows 7?