I don't know if anyone else has come across this, but I had a render going (was 10 hours in) and decided that I wanted to look at something on goole earth (the richat structure in the sahara if anyone is interested - something to try and create in TG2?). To do this I had knocked the thread priority down so that google earth would function ok which has never previously caused me problems and I do quite often since TG2 still renders at about 80% and you can watch video, use photoshop etc... quite happily.
However to my dismay on killing google earth I discovered that TG2 would not ramp up again even when it's thread prioity was increased back up. It was just sat at 0% processor usage (with idle at 99%). All I had was a blank (white) render window and no repsponse form the UI part. I left it running whilst searching for, and desperately hoping that, the temp file might allow me to use half the image and create second half from a crop. This involved opening a second copy of TG2 and exploring temp files as I wasn't sure where they were held and search was taking too long. I unfortunately seemed to have no temp file from this render (does it only create them at the end or on abort?) so was feeling pretty dispondant. But then, about 3 or 4 minutes after the google earth process ended and just as I was about to give up and kill TG2, it suddenly just kicked off and is rendering away happily again.
Just though I'd post that in case anyone every has the same or similar problem.... solution would appear to be just to sit and wait! (or maybe starting a second copy helped???)
Well, Google Earth uses your graphics card. I do not know in what ways that influences the render (Don't even know if TG2 utilizes Graphics acceleration), but I can imagen that it would take a while to get things started after that...
That is a really weird bug. TG2 doesn't use the graphics card right now, but it could have been *takes a shot in the dark* a RAM allocation thing.
Yea I don't know, that seems to point to RAM but I'm not 100% sure. Very few 3D rendering programs have the ability to use the graphics card (only one I know of is MentalRay, POVRay might be able to as well) so that didn't affect it at all.
weird, it could have been just a coincdence. but it also could be google or terragen some how moving into each other mem, like an allocation error or somthing.
Regards,
Will
TG does use the graphics card for the 3D preview.
not for renders though
regards,
will
Quote from: 3DGuy on February 11, 2007, 08:17:25 PM
TG does use the graphics card for the 3D preview.
I thought it used software OpenGL for the preview, not hardware?
I doubt there is any graphis card issue as I have 512MB of RAM on mine and it is pretty quick, alt-tabbing out of games for exmaple happens almost instantaneuosly. Although open GL is used my GPU supports it so it will run on the card, but as noted previously the render process does not use it (although if they can find a way of using the GPU's power to speed up render times...).
On the RAM side, there was no switching of data from disk back to RAM going on (I'd have heard it, my disks a litle old!!), the machine simply sat idle until all of a sudden TG2 seemed to kick off again. And if Google and TG2 had written over each others memory than I would have expected one or both the apps would have crashed. In the end my render completed successfully (well the result wasn't quite what I hoped but I can't blame memory corruption for that ;) )
i have had terragen 2 do this two, with some renders. if i start tg2 up and render something and the render window says render 14hrs. if i alt, ctrl delete tg render cpu run time is often a couple hours out.. so tg2 is obviously sitting doing nothing for some period...
though then again my xp gets gradually less stable with tg2 running and other programs being used... Also noticed that if i render something. swap file bloats out to 900mb-1.2gb though i have 521mb ram out of my 1gb not being used!!!...
yea there is definatly room for optimizations, can't wait till the next release.
regards,
Will