Lightwave Memory Segments

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Silverstreak
Posts: 21
Joined: Sat Jan 19, 2019 2:51 pm

Lightwave Memory Segments

Post by Silverstreak »

Hi,

I've been getting a little stuck using LW5 on real hardware using the memory segment feature, resulting in crashes. Because I have plenty of RAM on both systems, I thought I would increase this to help with render times.

However, this seems to result in unstable but repeatable behaviour. Certain values work, others do not. I dug up an old tutorial that suggested decreasing by half a meg each time, until you found a stable number. Is this correct? It seems sort of crazy!

Cheers,

Ant
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muadib
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Posts: 168
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2018 7:26 pm

Re: Lightwave Memory Segments

Post by muadib »

Silverstreak wrote: Sat Sep 05, 2020 9:19 am Hi,

I've been getting a little stuck using LW5 on real hardware using the memory segment feature, resulting in crashes. Because I have plenty of RAM on both systems, I thought I would increase this to help with render times.

However, this seems to result in unstable but repeatable behaviour. Certain values work, others do not. I dug up an old tutorial that suggested decreasing by half a meg each time, until you found a stable number. Is this correct? It seems sort of crazy!

Cheers,

Ant
Hi Anthony,

RAM gets sucked up by other things as well, mostly by Images and objects loaded in a scene.

What I do to determine the Max Seg.Memory amount is start from the lowest (1,000,000 or 1MB), then while the scene is rendering go to the Workbench screen and see how much Fast RAM there is available and then add that amount minus say 1MB.

If, for example, the scene being rendered leaves 6MB Fast Ram, I then add 5MB to the initial 1MB, leaving the system with 1MB RAM.
Of course, once you reach 1 segment during rendering there is no need to add more RAM. For example, High Res Laced or Standard Video resolution needs 9,500,000 bytes RAM to reach 1 segment.


Try this out and let me know what happens! :)
- muadib
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