After 13 hours this is what I get out of TG.
Rendering @ 1500x1125 Very little displacement "3.6 lateral normalized" in base colors. .9 quality, 4AA and Atmo quality at 75.
Using a 4097 ter. import.
Only 3 surface layers with default displacement.
No image map shaders.
Only 1 TGO Object.
1 water plane with a Power Fractal Shader attached for color only. I disabled the displacement.
This is a Very simple water scene and after the sky finishes and the water starts to render I get this error and I lose 13 hours of computer time, wear and tear on my cpu and whatever the power consumption is.
My guess is the problem is in the water plane. Yeah I know disable the fractal shader attached to the water shader. NO!
All the crop previews rendered fine as did the full 800x600
WHERE IS THE UPDATE WE ARE SUPPOSE TO BE GETTING????
PS- If Planetside wants the tgd they will ask for it.
Does anyone know the meaning of Insanity? Well I do, It's Doing the Same thing over and over and expecting different results. I guess I'm fricking Nutts.
Opps! forgot the screen shot.
I share your pain!
Too often I'm getting cool results only to have to give up and start a new project because I cant render the final image properly or it simply crashes. Come on Planetside, we know you can do it, sort out these problems...please :'(
Richard
Buzzzzz,
I understand. I've worked on a lot of special renders that weren't that special that rendered fine at a low resolution only to blow up at a higher resolution. My computer is strewn with the TGD ruins of tired efforts. Time to clean my hard-drive.
Buzzzzz,
I know this may only be like putting a band-aid on a bloody stump, mainly because I don't know how extensive you water is. I have found that using a disc and placing it where I want it, then applying the water shader to it sometimes helps the crashing. My thoght is that you are placing water only where you need it and not the whole planet, which Terragen seem to need to calculate. Just a thought. :)
sonshine777: Nice idea. TG2 is already doing this. The lake is a disc with a certain centre and radius ,-)
Buzzzzz: PatPatPat ;D
Quote from: sonshine777 on August 29, 2007, 10:30:45 AM
Buzzzzz,
I know this may only be like putting a band-aid on a bloody stump, mainly because I don't know how extensive you water is. I have found that using a disc and placing it where I want it, then applying the water shader to it sometimes helps the crashing. My thoght is that you are placing water only where you need it and not the whole planet, which Terragen seem to need to calculate. Just a thought. :)
I"ll give that a try. Good idea! What really makes me boil is I have to re-render the sky which took 13 hours.
Quote from: Volker Harun on August 29, 2007, 10:32:25 AM
Buzzzzz: PatPatPat ;D
And what exactly do you mean by that Volker?
Like patting a fury pet?
The sky has grain, cloud samples - not atmospheric - should be raised.
Volker
I think it was a sympathetic pat on the back.
:)
Well.... I think Planetside have this day and to more days before the next release if I have figured it out.
I am not having any big problems with it as it is, but I can understand your frustration.
Quote from: Volker Harun on August 29, 2007, 10:41:14 AM
Like patting a fury pet?
The sky has grain, cloud samples - not atmospheric - should be raised.
Volker
Yeah , I saw that, upper left. Lets see give TG more strain. LOL
Thanks for the sympathy, that was nice but what I need is a stable piece of software. LOL ;D
Well, the error that encountered is rather a hardware than software issue. At least I was able to get rid off these kind of crashes by changing the memory. That was on one hardware. The other counting-machines never had crashed like this.
The crashes I encountered thereafter were only frozen GUI.
Quote from: Volker Harun on August 29, 2007, 10:48:45 AM
Well, the error that encountered is rather a hardware than software issue. At least I was able to get rid off these kind of crashes by changing the memory. That was on one hardware. The other counting-machines never had crashed like this.
The crashes I encountered thereafter were only frozen GUI.
So I need to buy 4 GB of different memory? You want to loan me the money? LOL
I have ran extensive memory tests on this memory with no errors.
I see Matt is in the house, maybe he will chime in?
It does not have to be the memory. I looked at your image again. The library that caused the problem is the ntdll.dll
Google for it. As far as I know it is doing some read/write stuff on harddiscs. But it is not my proffession.
I'm sorry you're running into these crashes Jay. Some rendering problems have been fixed in the alpha versions and will be released in the next few days, but some problems still remain.
Although I have not been able to completely eliminate these crashes so far, the problem seems to lie in a part of the renderer which is currently being ripped out and redesigned in order to improve speed, memory use and also the ability to render transparency and more accurate reflections.
We'll send updates to registered Deep customers in the next few days, and post a reminder here on the forums in case there are any email delivery problems.
Matt
Thanks for your reply Matt. Looking forward to the update as I'm sure everyone is. I think what I'll do with this scene is ask my friend Bob if he would give it a go on his new machine. His is cutting edge so we might see if it's my machine or TG. I'll let you know the results if Bob has time?
Hi Buzzzzz,
Quote from: Buzzzzz on August 29, 2007, 11:14:15 AM
Thanks for your reply Matt. Looking forward to the update as I'm sure everyone is. I think what I'll do with this scene is ask my friend Bob if he would give it a go on his new machine. His is cutting edge so we might see if it's my machine or TG. I'll let you know the results if Bob has time?
If you post the file(s) or email them to me at :
jomeder@planetside.co.uk
I'll set them running on one of my Macs over the weekend. It'll be interesting to see how the Mac version handles it. Not saying it will be any better, but it might give some different information if it crashes, and I haven't personally done much stress testing of the Mac version.
Regards,
Jo
Quote from: jo on August 29, 2007, 08:19:18 PM
Hi Buzzzzz,
Quote from: Buzzzzz on August 29, 2007, 11:14:15 AM
Thanks for your reply Matt. Looking forward to the update as I'm sure everyone is. I think what I'll do with this scene is ask my friend Bob if he would give it a go on his new machine. His is cutting edge so we might see if it's my machine or TG. I'll let you know the results if Bob has time?
If you post the file(s) or email them to me at :
jomeder@planetside.co.uk
I'll set them running on one of my Macs over the weekend. It'll be interesting to see how the Mac version handles it. Not saying it will be any better, but it might give some different information if it crashes, and I haven't personally done much stress testing of the Mac version.
Regards,
Jo
Thanks Jo, Lets see... the terrain I used is Hallowed Ground (32mb) which you can download from my site. http://buzzzzzart.com/downloads/Hallowed%20Ground%204097.zip (http://buzzzzzart.com/downloads/Hallowed%20Ground%204097.zip) I will email the tgd to the above address. You may want to crop the sky out as it rendered fine, however it took 13 hours. The crash happens in the first buffer of water.
Thanks Again,
Jay
That is a really sweet sky you have there. Beautiful.
This must be very annoying.
Fortunately I've never had TG2 crash while rendering but I do get the constant UI freezes on the PC version which freezes Windows - a very annoying OS to test alpha software on. Not on Mac though. The MAC TG2 is far more stable but the UI is sluggish compared to the PC version. Why is this? I know the OSX desktop is generally a bit slower than Windows but TG2 is very sluggish.
Hi efflux,
Quote from: efflux on September 02, 2007, 03:43:27 AM
The MAC TG2 is far more stable but the UI is sluggish compared to the PC version. Why is this? I know the OSX desktop is generally a bit slower than Windows but TG2 is very sluggish.
Can you please explain what you mean by sluggish? Specific examples would be a big help.
I don't find the Mac UI sluggish in general. There are some cases where it can be. One is when rendering, it can be sluggish when you want to change between windows, or even to other applications. I've never really tried editing settings and such during rendering, because I know that will be slow. This problem should be resolved when TG2 is threaded. I don't know if you use TG Mac v0.9, but there was a tremendous difference in the usability when I made the renderer run in a separate thread to the application. It was a lot easier to use other applications while TG Mac was rendering too, because you didn't have to wait for ages for the TG Mac to switch to other applications and vice versa.
The other time I've noticed some sluggishness is when you get to higher 3D preview detail settings with more complex scenes.
What sort of Mac do you have?
Regards,
Jo
OK. Thanks for the reply jo.
I have a PowerMac G5 dual core 2.0 GHz with 2 gigs RAM. My PCs are P4 3.0 GHz 2 gigs RAM. With apps that are multi core enabled then obviously the Mac is faster. When not multi core enabled then the PCs are usually faster. However the OSX desktop is always a little slower than with Windows or Linux but nothing that really hampers work speed. As far as I know this is simply due to how OSX utilizes your graphics card for the desktop. It sends it to Open GL as far as I'm aware and I guess ultimately makes for better CPU usage for other tasks going on. My graphics card is a standard Geforce 6600 PCI Express. However TG2 UI is slow in feedback. Specifically when doing tricky things like hooking up nodes. I find myself having to delay to make sure things are hooked with the mouse. This gets fiddly compared to on the PC. Also, when I cancel a render it takes a while to take effect, maybe 5 to 10 seconds whereas on my PC this is almost instant. The complexity of the planet or preview or anything has little impact on these UI speeds. Rendering is fine. About the speeds I'd expect for one 2.0 GHz core.
As for stability, this is far superior on the Mac. I can't remember having to shut TG2 down or very rarely. On the PC, TG2 often crashes the whole system. Not always possible to even force quit an app which is just one of many things I hate with Windows.
By the way I haven't tested the latest TG2 release yet. Possibly some of the stability issues on the PC are resolved.
Funny, I've always been able to force quit TG2 by using Task Manager. Nevertheless, I still think the Mac OS is probably superior in many ways to Windows.
I can never force quit it that way. I have to switch my system off.
Hi Efflux,
Quote from: efflux on September 03, 2007, 02:46:44 AM
I have a PowerMac G5 dual core 2.0 GHz with 2 gigs RAM. My PCs are P4 3.0 GHz 2 gigs RAM.
This is basically the same as my main work machines, except I have a dual 2.7 PowerMac G5.
QuoteHowever the OSX desktop is always a little slower than with Windows or Linux but nothing that really hampers work speed. As far as I know this is simply due to how OSX utilizes your graphics card for the desktop. It sends it to Open GL as far as I'm aware and I guess ultimately makes for better CPU usage for other tasks going on. My graphics card is a standard Geforce 6600 PCI Express.
I'm not sure that the graphics card is used as much as it could be yet, although you're right, OpenGL is used for certain things. I think this will be more widespread in OS X 10.5. I actually find my Windows machine to be a lot more sluggish than my Macs running OS X.
Quote
However TG2 UI is slow in feedback. Specifically when doing tricky things like hooking up nodes. I find myself having to delay to make sure things are hooked with the mouse. This gets fiddly compared to on the PC.
Have you tried unchecking the "Use line smoothing" checkbox in the Network View panel of the preferences? Does that improve things? I would say that the OpenGL stuff does seem to slow down a little more quickly on the Mac as opposed to Windows. One difference is that in the Mac version I've been experimenting with higher quality text rendering, and with more complex networks the higher quality text does slow things down. I have experimented with using a cache briefly, and it did speed things up although it also stopped working after a while. I will look into it further in the near future. If you have a project which seems particularly slow I would be interested in seeing it.
Quote
Also, when I cancel a render it takes a while to take effect, maybe 5 to 10 seconds whereas on my PC this is almost instant.
This should improve when things get threaded.
Quote
The complexity of the planet or preview or anything has little impact on these UI speeds.
I'd expect that because these are slightly different things to what I was thinking about originally :-).
Quote
Rendering is fine. About the speeds I'd expect for one 2.0 GHz core.
The Mac version generally seems to go pretty well. I have noticed that it seems a bit faster on an Intel Mac than a PPC one, for whatever reason.
Regards,
Jo
OK, thanks.
I'm testing the new TG versions. The PC one seems more stable. It crashed but only once.
I'm getting more used to the slower UI on the Mac. Initially I started using TG2 nearly always on the PC because it's faster at rendering. That got me used to the quicker UI so it felt frustrating using the Mac version. It's not a major issue. The thing that slows me down more than anything is the delay when canceling renders because I'm always canceling test renders.
I think, because OSX utilizes Open GL it actually hogs it a bit more than on the PC so Open GL use for other apps is not so quick on a Mac. However my Mac totally excells at audio production, probably because UI functions don't disturb other processes as much. Audio production has to maintain near realtime. Windows is not so good for audio. You can move a Window and get an audio glitch.
Hi efflux,
Quote from: efflux on September 05, 2007, 02:19:07 AM
I'm getting more used to the slower UI on the Mac. Initially I started using TG2 nearly always on the PC because it's faster at rendering. That got me used to the quicker UI so it felt frustrating using the Mac version. It's not a major issue. The thing that slows me down more than anything is the delay when canceling renders because I'm always canceling test renders.
If your PC renders faster than the Mac then it is perhaps understandable that the UI is faster on your PC. Can you post some render time comparisons so we have an idea of the basic relative performance of your computers?
Quote
I think, because OSX utilizes Open GL it actually hogs it a bit more than on the PC so Open GL use for other apps is not so quick on a Mac. However my Mac totally excells at audio production, probably because UI functions don't disturb other processes as much. Audio production has to maintain near realtime. Windows is not so good for audio. You can move a Window and get an audio glitch.
I would agree that Windows has always seemed a little bit lame at audio (it still struggles with things that Amigas got right in the early 80s). However I've also found that there are big differences from one PC to the next, which I put down to the sound card and/or the audio drivers. Basic audio playback for example can get glitchy on my Acer laptop for no apparent reason, but my older Dell never had those problems. If you're doing heavy CPU-based audio synthesis and try to do a lot with the UI at the same time then you can have problems - that's to be expected because of Windows's reliance on the CPU for most of the UI. But if you have glitches while doing simple wav/mp3 playback then maybe you need a better sound card or updated drivers.
Apple have the advantage that they can develop the OS for a known range of hardware. And as a user you know exactly what you're buying.
Matt
Hi Matt.
I will do a render comparison but at the moment I have a render going. I'll do it when it finishes. I think the Mac does pretty well just on the single CPU though.
I use Logic Pro for music production so I had to buy a Mac whether I liked it or not due to Apple buying Emagic but I never regretted it.
Audio performance can be superb in Linux with a custom kernel but the apps aren't very good so it's no go really. Amiga's are probably still better for MIDI which is absurd. Even on my Mac I know timing is not rock solid. Interfacing is all pro stuff. Recently I bought an old 1960s all valve reel to reel tape recorder (in near unused condition) which has mind blowing beautiful sound quality literally making a mockery of digital sound interfaces at thousands of £. I have a valve hifi amp and various other valve units and amps, analog synth etc. I don't need central heating when all this is turned on. The hifi amp is a huge beast at 500 watts power consumption. I dread to think what my electricity bill will be like. Sadly this all valve and analog gear completely disintegrates digital in pure beauty of sound. When I convert to digital something is completely lost. Computers and audio don't mix too well but they are a brilliant necessity to edit stuff on.
I don't feel the same way about visual art though even although I come from a traditional art background. Computers are great for art. Analog photography for a start is a total pain. TG2 is an example. How else could you create an entire planet? Well there is (was) another app but I won't go there. For me this is a magical use of technology to create art. Music is more about a realtime performance, that's where computers screw it up.
I think my PCs actually perform very well considering I've had them for over five years and never a single problem. They are hyperthreading with 800 MHz FSB. Abit IC7-G motherboards. Previous motherboards I've used have had problems. Abit's seem to be rock solid.
By the way. The Mac version is the one I really want to use because my intention is to bin Windows. The dream scenario would be multi core enabled for Mac with Linux rendering.
Well, when the app is threaded, it will be so on both Mac and Windows. I'm not sure about Linux, though....
Hi Matt,
Quote from: Matt on September 05, 2007, 10:14:56 AM
If your PC renders faster than the Mac then it is perhaps understandable that the UI is faster on your PC. Can you post some render time comparisons so we have an idea of the basic relative performance of your computers?
Read my message above for an explanation of why the network view, which is one of the parts of the UI efflux was talking about, can be slower on the Mac than on Windows. Nothing to do with render speeds.
Regards,
Jo
I got around to doing a quick comparison test. The results:
PC P4 3.0 GHz:
0.04:36s
PowerMac G5 2.0 GHz dual core (obviously only using one core):
0.05.59s
So the Mac's single core is faster than the GHz label implies. Probably the dual core helps here as well even although TG is only using one core but I can't imagine by that much.
Hi efflux,
I've found the same as you - Macs seem to render a wee bit faster clock-for-clock. However my Intel iMac, which is slower than my G5, renders faster than my G5, so that's interesting. It may be that Core/Core Duo based machines are faster clock-for-clock for rendering that our G5s and P4s.
Regards,
Jo
P4s will be notably slower clock-for-clock than G5's or Athlon's and certainly slower compared to Core 2's. The P4 architectural approach was designed to pump the Ghz up as high as possible as fast as possible and it relied on this for performance gains until it hit a wall around 3.6Ghz. Meanwhile Athlon's were matching or beating performance at 1Ghz lower clock speed or more. It's all in the relative efficiency of the architecture...
- Oshyan
Sorry, if I post in wrong thread, this looks appropiate :)
Just quick question...
The problem is: render takes only 50% of my CPU. I'm on the WinXP, P4 2.60Ghz.
I know there is such thing as HT (HyperThreading), which can be turned off or on. I believe, its now turned ON (?)
So the question is - will HT Off speed up my render (taking 99% of CPU) or its not important?
Thanks!
Please see this previously posted answer:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=462.msg3164#msg3164
- Oshyan