I have already searched, and found some information regarding octree settings. In my most recent project, I had an issue where I would crash often when rendering. Not repeatable though, sometimes the same settings would work. I had bumped octree up to 256. When it worked, it worked fairly fast, but like I said, it would often crash. I have several large models in the scene - willow trees from Arbaro.
Lowering the octree value renders fine, but takes a lot longer. Question - When I set the octree higher, what am I fighting with from a systems standpoint? Is ther a graphics card (Nvidia) or memory setting I could change that would go hand in hand with a higher octree value?
Windows XP Pro
2ghz processor
2gb ram
Nvidia geo force 128mb
Blender 2.42a
Your graphics card has nothing to do with rendering…well, except displaying the image
Higher octree resolution simply needs more RAM, and possibly causes a bit more traffic in the memory controller.
Unless it’s a bug, i’d say you have a stability problem with your RAM, unfortunatelly not that uncommon.
Maybe run a memory stress-test. What kind of crashes are those? Just blender or also system freezes, reboots etc?
Blender only crashes, and usually fairly quickly 1-2 minutes into render. No other problems. Can you reccomend anything in the way of performance tuning, virtual memory etc?
Thanks!
EDIT - The file is large, 1875410 verts - 236 mb file size unpacked. I can only get it to render consistently at octree=64. But when it does work at 256, it takes less than 5 minutes as opposed to 31.
