Thought I would start a new post as we are moving on !!
7687 sims this fine in r23 and viewport updates OK. I will check R20 and 21 later Render for frame 53 ( i think) was 14 mins + I have enclosed the logs/scene and a GPU-Z log Desktop.zip (67.8 KB)
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Log states “set primary device to the 1070” but I have the Titan set as the sim node in preferences. And render to picture viewer works frame rendered in 16m 48s
And following on from your comment made in the public post about R23 and it’s viewport changes could this be the reason that the sim is visible in the viewport in R23 but not in R20 and R21 . I also note that I can no longer render to picture viewer.
Edit…now I can !1 very odd maybe something to do with switching from R23 to R21 and back again. Today I just rebooted and opened R23 and simmed and it rendered to PV. But…I switched off caching in the reaction-cache menu and yet it still caches to disk. log enclosed. The log says set primary to the 1070 but the graph editor preferences says Titan and it is def simming on the Titan. On a 100 frame project it sins 02.rea to 101.rea and when i rewind it sims the 01.rea. reactions1102.zip (952 Bytes)
Thanks again for the feedback.
Render performance
One thing that the log shows is that a small fraction of the tiles (9 out of 264) take most of the time. This may lead to the CPU being underutilized. This looks like the Volume only took up a small part of the image. If you want to reduce the render times for these tests, better use a small resolution with the volume filling a larger part of the image. This will generate enough “busy” tiles to fill up the CPU.
The new build 7699 has additional Performance Logging which can be enabled in the Preferences tab. This will also measure the simulation and some IO times.
Incorrect render device logged
The primary device will always be set to GPU 0 on startup. It should then switch to the GPU selected in Preferences when the GPU is first used for simulation.
Viewport issues
ATM I don’t see a relation between the viewport issues of TFD and Reactions. Reactions has a new renderer with its own set of new bugs 
I wasn’t able to reproduce the issues on R20 or R21 yet.
In R20, could you check that Preferences/OpenGL/Hardware OpenGL is checked? If not please check it, restart R20 and try again.
Caching continues despite being turned off
The cache may continue writing previously queued frames for a while. It should not write frames that had not been simulated when your turned off the cache.
The new Performance Logging option will log when a frame is pushed to the cache for storage. This will let you confirm more clearly whether the caching was deactivated right away.
Simming a test now on 7698. First thing I notice is that the viewport shows the sim in progress but becomes unresponsive though still simming. I got it to go to 4 views and lost the VP shading and then back to perspective and the shading is no longer there. It has done the sim now and will test the renders etc then post the logs and then check R21 then R20
OK that seemed to go well. Cached the frames and deletes them then ran the sim with caching off and no frames were cached. Performance log also showed details. Enabled caching and it is doing it’s thing. As usual it flys up to frame 80 then suddenly slows down. Will now install 7699 and check that.
The slowdown in sim performance appears to be due to a storage bottleneck. Before 78F the “store cache” time is less than 0.1sec, then it increases significantly to between 1sec and 8sec per frame for the rest of the sequence. If you are storing the cache to a mechanical HDD that is relatively full and/or used for different access patterns (like when it’s the main C: drive that holds Windows and apps), this is expectable behavior.
I’ll add selective caching to the Volume Grid node soon that will allow you to disable velocity caching to save bandwidth and storage.
The first render times are mixed in this log. Some are good - less than 1sec for the render your did, no clumping of busy tiles, other have the the clumping effect again and are slower too. Are the render times comparable to Arnold?
Did you get a crash report from C4D? If so, please attach it (see here for more details)
From the log file it looks like the crash may be related to another viewport related issue that will get a fix soon.
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Sorry no crash/bug file C4D R23 just did it’s “I’m off” trick…does not even give a goodbye. I have over 200GB on this drive free and and have set antiV to not scan the Reactions folder. Sadly this rig is getting old now and I just cannot justify funds on upgrades…I must get a new tutorial out and selling to warrant spending on kit !!! Working away on R20 and the viewport does show when siming but at frame 80 is stops showing though still sims the data…as you say some sort of bottle neck. I will have a look at Arnold when I am sure I have it all stable as is. To be honest though Arnold has a reasonable monthly cost Redshift seems much faster and better for the vdb GPU rendering, just tricky to get the quality of render that Arnold gets. Getting some speed up with adjusting Step size and transmission threshold but though there is a good speed up it is still very slow for renders that are using no GI/Multi scattering and not even a floor object. Still…i will grind on…the priority is to have Reactions stable and working and render speed up can come later.
And with r20 once the viewport stops updating the volume the sim just flys through …seconds as opposed to minutes in R23…so we need a way of switching off viewport update if it is not already there and I am missing it. Edit…flying through because it stopped writing the cache to disk !! Oh I am at hair puling stage again been at this since midnight !!!
Here is the file and log. The screen threw a wobbler at frame 80 or there abouts. I will test on R21 which is my preferred version though to be honest r23 seems fine with Reactions and I have not updated it…if it ain’t broke…I read of many problems people are having with R23 so I will not tempt fate and update. 7699r20.zip (87.8 KB)
Note the R20 file i saved at frame 240 and it hangs c4d on load. R21 has the same problems bailing out at frame 89 or there about. Rewound to frame zero shold it should not hang c4d !! EDIT…The same file on R23 has no issues so it has to be something that R23 does better which is something Maxon would love to hear !! Or something you have done to Reactions that optimizes it for R23 7699r21.zip (71.7 KB)
There are no version specific optimizations. Whatever does not work in R20 or R21 is most likely a bug in Reactions.
I can confirm a hang on load of a scene if the stored cache path does not exist. The fix fill come up later today (build 0.1 7721 or later).
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