Pixar's RenderMan & Maya - NVIDIA Quadro K4200

[RedLad]

Hi everyone,

I am not totally sure if this is a graphics card issue, but I will post it here to get started anyway. I will also be posting again over in the Official Pixar forum, but would like to see if anyone can help here also.

I have recently wiped my PC and reinstalled Windows 7. All drivers/Windows updates are installed. I have Maya 2018.5 installed along with RenderMan Non-Commercial version 22.3.

This latest RenderMan has been totally re-written and is meant to be blazing quick in IPR mode. I have seen demos of it upon release and it is indeed, the team did an amazing job with this release, it does seem a lot zippier and responsive. However...

I am running IPR and it is running fine, I can do material edits, move geometry in the viewport and it all updates fine in the IPR window. But, after some minutes, it begins to stutter and becomes nowhere near as responsive as it should be. For example, I had a piece of geometry and went to hide it, then Maya and the IPR froze for approx. 4 mins, then came back to life, reflecting the change. But this is meant to be interactive, on the fly updates. (This was a bare bones scene with a ground place, a few spheres, cubes and a torus. With no textures! A brutally simple scene.) It is a bit random, it will run normal for another few mins, while I move the camera around the scene. But, then lets say I go to move the position of a light, it freezes up for about 20 or 30 secs, then decides to move the light. Instead of showing an instant update.

Can anyone suggest any ideas of how I would go about fixing this? I know that it is definitely not meant to behave in this manner. It is meant to be WAY more responsive.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[RedLad]

Just a tag-on to the above - if I install this, would it make a difference?

NVIDIA DRIVERS Quadro Desktop/Quadro Notebook Driver Release 390 WHQL

I just installed this driver when I wiped the PC:

Access Denied

The link above says access denied, but is an actual link to Dell's Official Driver page for my Precision PC.

Thanks

 

[RedLad]

Hi again,

Any takers for this one?

 

[iko22]

Hello RedLad

Is this discussion, Build Help: PC for Maya rendering, heavy photoshop, gaming. Bottlenecks and price? : buildapc , any use to you?

As you have expectations of the RenderMan software then perhaps you should post your question on the RenderMan community. Pixar's RenderMan | Support

 

[RedLad]

Thanks for the link, I will take a look. For your second part - yes I am a regular user on the Pixar forum, I just wanted to get some opinions here in relation to the card, to see if that was an issue.

BTW, could you please have a look at my question here? The guy who was helping seems to have disappeared, he was great help before:

Windows 7 clean install - BIOS questions & system startup time

 

[iko22]

Thanks for the link, I will take a look. For your second part - yes I am a regular user on the Pixar forum, I just wanted to get some opinions here in relation to the card, to see if that was an issue.

BTW, could you please have a look at my question here? The guy who was helping seems to have disappeared, he was great help before:

Windows 7 clean install - BIOS questions & system startup time

Hello RedLad,

Could you please post your other questions on new threads, in the respective forums to give people who can help a chance to read and share these questions? Thank you.​

 

[RedLad]

I just made a new thread there iko22

 

[RedLad]

Hi everyone,

I have made some very promising progress on getting RenderMan to work in Maya and would like to share the story, if it helps others.

What did i do? Upgraded to Windows 10! I had previously tried to upgrade to 10, only for it to tell me it could not be installed on my PC. Since then, after wiping the PC and resigning to staying on Windows 7, I updated the BIOS along with drivers etc. So there a few hours ago after still seeing how bad RenderMan was still performing in Maya, I took a chance to try the Windows 10 upgrade again....and it worked this time! I guess the BIOS update had a hand in that.

Firstly, WOW, the difference in speed is actually INSANE! Now this is what I expected. IPR is really flying now. Very, very responsive with not one sign of the problems I had in Windows 7. Lights/meshes etc being able to be selected in the viewports, being able to move them. Zero lag, zero memory spikes, zero random freezes. It is so zippy and responsive. I cannot tell you how happy I am to see this. I knew the performance I was getting in Windows 7 had to be just untrue. It was close to unusable.

Just wanted to share this, I am chuffed. Thanks to sevenforums user Paul Black for all of his help to get my machine up and running in Windows 7, but now I will be using 10 from now on.

Cheers,

Paul

 

[iko22]

Hello RedLad,

Thanks for returning and sharing your feedback. Some folk say Win 10 has less bottlenecks. It certainly can handle more RAM more efficiently. You might want to check your page file size on that computer, to see if this has shrunk since leaving Win 7. That also could explain the speedup difference between the two operating systems.

Yes, I know Paul Black had done lots to help you perform a clean install on your other thread. He will be pleased. I expect the clean install and the BIOS update have helped the Windows upgrade go smoothly.

Don't forget to join tenforums and do a backup of your system image, just in case you get problems with any updates in the future.

Good Luck.

 

[RedLad]

Cheers, yes once I get it all up and running how I want I will do the system image for sure. Doing that in Windows 7 helped me a good bit over the past few weeks.