I’ve just been handed a nice upgrade to my PC and the only issue I am having is Blender no likey the Ati Radeon HD8400 graphics card. (Windows XP home 3GB of ram)
Some scenes render fine, others crash as it starts the render process. At first I thought it was particles, but then some particle scenes work, as do some scenes using Blender Gurus Grass Essentials. However, other scenes crash and I can’t determine what is different between the two. I thought it may be “hair”, but as I say, it isn’t consistent.
Has anyone else had this issue?
I have zero budget but am wondering if I’d just be better of forking out for a budget Geforce card such as the Geforce GT610, I can just about stretch to that. Of course, if there is a ‘fix’ so much the better, but from what I can gather reading the forums, ATI cards aren’t happy with Blender and of course do not support CUDA.
9 out of 10 times when Blender crashes on rendering it’s due to running out of memory…
And with only 3 GB of RAM (and only 2 GB of that usable for any process on a 32-bit OS) it’s likely that this has nothing to do with the GPU at all. Or do you use some kind of OpenCL special build of Blender to render on an ATI GPU? If not, Blender will not use the graphics card for anything render related.
BTW, Windows XP is not officially supported any more by current versions of Blender afaik. Time to change maybe, e. g. to a lightweight Linux distribution?
I’ve narrowed it down to something to do with particles, even though the scene takes under 500MB when rendering and the system is showing 2.4GB available and the card is, theoretically 1GB, anything requiring over 400MB of RAM seems to crash, dunno if it is the number of particles or not.
I should mention, I have an ancient HP DX2250 with 2GB of ram and a non CUDA geforce card, (8400 GS) which runs this scene perfectly fine on the same version of Blender without crashing, with all the particle systems turned on, it’s dog slow, but it renders fine. That’s why I suspected the ATI card rather than memory.
Update: Yep, definitely anything over 400MB causes a crash, 110000 particles, fine, 120000 particles BOOM. It’s as if it’s using the graphics card memory over the PC, which still has tons available, even though there is no GPU option. Confusing.
Bizzarely, if I have tiles over progressive render even that setting crashes. Daft when an old system can work with less resources. >>confused<<
Tried the 3GB switch, made no difference whatsoever.
Interestingly, if I use shift+Z to make the viewport rendered, it renders in that fine, but F12 causes a crash. Also swapped out the graphics card to another from an old pc and it made no difference, so can eliminate the grpahics card as the issue.
Strange that my old PC with only 2GB of ram would render it though. Alas, in typical ‘bad timing’ fashion, that died on me today. :mad:
Daft when an old system can work with less resources. >>confused<<