"Unknown error in render thread"

[Mohawk20]

The well known error...
It's bugging me a lot lately. I know why, because the virtual memory use is at 1.6 Gb and the normal memory use is at 1.2 Gb, on a 3Gb system without the 3Gb switch enabled. But the thing is, I can render exactly one scene without problems at 1024x768. But any next render fail with aforementioned error. Or if I do a test render or 2 and want to do a full quality one after that the error shows it's dirty nose.

So mainly the problem is that the memory isn't completely cleared before the next render starts.


Can this be fixed?

[Oshyan]

Either the memory isn't completely cleared or it gets fragmented. Having done multiple successive renders of my "4.7 trillion triangle" scene on an 8GB machine, with the memory use exceeding 3GB each time, I saw memory use go down to the same level each time, without rebooting. I was able to render fine multiple times, without restarting. I suspect however that if I had only had 4GB of memory it wouldn't have worked, perhaps due to memory fragmentation. I think the actual memory in use was not the issue. But I can't be sure.

We do of course try to keep on top of reproducible memory leaks and errors, but we have not seen anything significant of that kind since the release of 2.0.3.1. One way to test the "fragmentation" theory is whether restarting *just* TG2 fixes it. If so, then it's probably a TG2 issue of some kind (although not necessarily unreleased memory). If you have to restart your whole system, then it's more likely system-related, possibly memory fragmentation.

- Oshyan

[Mohawk20]

I *just* restart TG2. Whenever I get the render thread error, I stop the render, I save the scene, exit the program and restart it. After loading the scene, I can render at least one full render without errors.