New update

[Kevin F]

Good news on the update Matt - more than welcome.
Is the memory leak you describe the same one as seen after 4 or 5 preview renders, or is this a different one?

[cyphyr]

Great news about the update, hopefully it should be out by the time I return from the Festy. I notice that the update mentons nothing about the reflection/softshadow bug link. Has this been addressed in this update?
Richard

[Matt]

Kevin, yes that's the same leak.

Richard, this hasn't been fixed yet.

Matt

[DeathTwister]

Humm I just found this but heard of no update.  when is it coming? cool that it is by the way, was way to many bugs for my taste /winks lol.....when can I sink my teeth into something new? next week? not sure when his Feisty is hahahahaha.
DT

[PG]

DT
Here's the announcement itself. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4307.0

Looks like a good few of the problems are worked out, I'm very glad the missing buckets've been fixed.

[rcallicotte]

@Planetside -

This looks like a good leap toward the finished product.  I assume the Beta is now actually being worked on in its frozen features state. 

Thanks for letting us know it's coming soon.

[Matt]

Calico,

We're working towards the Beta now, yes. There are still some new features in the pipeline that didn't make it into the Tech Preview 4 but will be the Beta.

Matt

[Tangled-Universe]

I am very very happy to see the memory-leak, bucket error and object reloading bug all being solved
For me these were, in a random order, the most annoying bugs so far.
I'm looking forward to see the difference in renderspeed and the new GI settings.
I'll see if I can make a nice benchmark-scene for this to check out
I hope the 4th TP will fulfil the many wishes and that it will also (re)gain the trust of a part of the customer-base.

I don't want to run into things too early, but it might also be useful if you or Oshyan writes a small description/explanation of the new features. For example the new GI-settings and the "subdiv cache". Especially the latter sounds nice but it doesn't really make sense to me (yet).

Is there anything you can say about the features which didn't make it yet to be included in the TP4?
And will sub-surfacescattering be included in the beta?

Martin

[DeathTwister]

Thanks /smiles....
DT

[Oshyan]

Undo is probably the most significant feature that won't be in TP4.

The subdivision cache settings are pretty straightforward. They control how much total memory will be used by the subdivision cache (which is only a portion of the overall memory TG2 will use, but it's a fairly significant portion, depending on the scene). This in turn dictates how much memory is available *per thread*. So you simply divide the total size that you set by the number of threads you will be using, and you get a per-thread cache size. For example at 400MB (the default, I believe), with 4 threads (on a quad core CPU) you will have 100MB of available cache per thread.

Truth be told changing the size of the caches isn't going to be useful that often. Even using small caches doesn't seem to have a significant negative impact on render speed (and there's a 50MB per thread lower limit as well), so - as in the case of TG 0.9 in fact - using the default will be best in most cases.

- Oshyan

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks for jumping in Oshyan.

I'm not really into computerthings like cache etc.
What does this setting mean to me?
If I have a complex scene with many populations at VHQ and VHQ rendersettings.
Do I have to increase this cache or decrease it?
How do I use it, that's the primary question

[Cyber-Angel]

Undo is probably the most significant feature that won't be in TP4.

The subdivision cache settings are pretty straightforward. They control how much total memory will be used by the subdivision cache (which is only a portion of the overall memory TG2 will use, but it's a fairly significant portion, depending on the scene). This in turn dictates how much memory is available *per thread*. So you simply divide the total size that you set by the number of threads you will be using, and you get a per-thread cache size. For example at 400MB (the default, I believe), with 4 threads (on a quad core CPU) you will have 100MB of available cache per thread.

Truth be told changing the size of the caches isn't going to be useful that often. Even using small caches doesn't seem to have a significant negative impact on render speed (and there's a 50MB per thread lower limit as well), so - as in the case of TG 0.9 in fact - using the default will be best in most cases.

- Oshyan

Why is the subdivision cache management a completely manual affair that is down to the user alone? I would have thought that memory assignment pre-thread and the management and handling thereof would be part of the core program of TG2, but with user override where needed.

The problem that I can foresee with the manual approach is the handing off pre-machine/ node in farm scenarios where having to set the subdivision cache by hand for each machine/node on a large farm on a per-job basis would not be effective in time management/ human resources effectiveness for the farm managers.

Surely, in future there must be a way of TG2 and future versions handling this type of resource management in a more efficient, automatic fashion with (If not already present) mechanisms in place to prevent this system form taking more resources then are available both in terms of physical RAM and Virtual Memory, which would harm over all system performance and lead to system slow downs or even application freezing, neither of which is desirable.

Apart form these concerns I look forward to this next release.  

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel                          

[Oshyan]

Why is the subdivision cache management a completely manual affair that is down to the user alone? I would have thought that memory assignment pre-thread and the management and handling thereof would be part of the core program of TG2, but with user override where needed.

That's exactly what is available now. It's just that previously you could not override the settings.

T-U, if you had a very complex scene you might want to increase the cache size to make it render faster. It might also avoid certain rendering errors in some cases, although this is just a guess on my part.

- Oshyan

[JimHT]

Guess Harvey jumped ship a little too soon huh? 

[DeathTwister]

Humm Interesting there Cyber-Angel     and I think I would have to agree with there on that score and since I am going to later this year start rendering farms, this could be a huge pain in the U Know where later for large operations, but maybe very cool in personal projects, so yes I agree bro that does or will need to be addressed later if not now so hope they remember that one /smiles.....

Hahah and Ya with a name like birdbrain err I mean Harvey Birdman hahaha just funning ya bro if ya still around, and he does have some valid concerns and points about PS, just not to good at getting them out right was all.
Anyway Hes part of that Rendus.com Crowd with all the arrogant French people on it lolo, ROTFL Dang I love the French they so funny sometimes ROTFL.  Haha don't matter how good ones art is, they will find a way to tell you it is crap, so beware posting there, ROTFL, I do it for fun myself as I love them Frenchies talking hahahahahaha.  Hope he does  OK, hes a good egg really and has good insights into many things and a fantastic artist, so I am sure he will do OK.

DT