Hi there,I am fairly new to Houdini and i am having this problem which is not letting me move ahead with my work. I have tried all the possible things available on the forum but I am not able to find a solution to this problem. I am trying to do a Pyro simulation at division size of 0.08 with Opencl active. It simulates for few frames and then suddenly my screen freezes and goes blank and return a error message which says“Display driver AMD driver had stopped responding and has recovered”
At first I thought it was a issue with my graphic card so I consulted Amd Firepro customer care and they asked me to update the latest drivers.I did that but it does not seem to help ,the problem still exists.Then I updated with the latest Houdini built 12.1.85 the problem is still not solved. I tried to follow the example posted by Jeff Lait on the sidefx forum for opencl setup but even that kind of a setup did not show any improvement
Apart from all this if I reduce the resolution to 0.14 of the simulation it seems to work well so I assume it seems to work well at lower resolutions but as i try to improve the resolution it crashes at some point. I really have no clue as to why this is happening and what could be the solution for it.

My current graphic card is Amd Firepro V5900 with 2GB VRAM
I also tried this with AMD Radeon 7970 which has 3GB VRAM
Assuming that I was falling short of memory but even that did not solve the problem.

My complete system configuration is as follows:
Amd FX8150 8 core processor
Amd FIREPRO V5900 2GBVRAM
32GB of Ram
2TB of Hard Disk

I hope I can get some help here. :cry:

alihusen
as i try to improve the resolution it crashes at some point.

Perhaps, you ran out of GPU memory?

edward

alihusen
as i try to improve the resolution it crashes at some point.

Perhaps, you ran out of GPU memory?

So does it mean that I need a graphic card with a large frame buffer. I mean Larger VRAM like 4GB or 6GB.

I would also want to know if there is any other way to get this thing done quickly , like if its possible to distribute the simulation on each core of a multi-core processor. or anything like that or if its possible to take advantage of amazon cloud for distributing the simulation. I am sorry I am not sure if what I am saying is logical at all.

We've reported this issue to AMD, but it didn't make the current FirePro driver for this month (9.928.8.1). Hopefully they'll have it fixed in the next driver, likely late October.

twod
We've reported this issue to AMD, but it didn't make the current FirePro driver for this month (9.928.8.1). Hopefully they'll have it fixed in the next driver, likely late October.

So does that mean if I use another graphic card with similar amount of vram I will run into similar issues or is it worth switching to a different graphic card with a larger vram say like 4gb gtx 680 or 6gb sapphire toxic radeon hd 7970.
.Will it solve the issue or the issue is just related to the drivers and has nothing to do with vram.

AMD Radeon 7000 series or FirePro W cards, because of the current driver, will crash regardless of the size of the sim or VRAM on the hardware. This is a driver bug.

The 5900 should work, but you may run into VRAM limitations with its 2GB framebuffer. Generally voxel sims > 250x250x250 may run into trouble with 2GB.

twod
AMD Radeon 7000 series or FirePro W cards, because of the current driver, will crash regardless of the size of the sim or VRAM on the hardware. This is a driver bug.

The 5900 should work, but you may run into VRAM limitations with its 2GB framebuffer. Generally voxel sims > 250x250x250 may run into trouble with 2GB.

Thanks a lot that was really helpful. I just want to know one last thing which is not probably directly related to my question but it seems important.
Assuming that I already have a Amd Firepro V5900 which has 2GB VRAM. Is it possible to couple it up with a Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 7970 which has 6GB VRAM and use that solely as a Opencl device by setting the enviorment variable to second device even when these two devices cannot take advantage of Crossfirex Technology.

I believe it should be possible to do OpenCL on the 7970 while using the FirePro to handle display, though I've never tried it (assuming the driver is fixed for the 7970, of course).

twod
I believe it should be possible to do OpenCL on the 7970 while using the FirePro to handle display, though I've never tried it (assuming the driver is fixed for the 7970, of course).

So it means there is no need for a Crossfirex connections between the two graphic cards to use second device as a OpenCL device. Thanks a lot once again.

That's correct. You only need a crossfire connection for dividing the rendering work over 2 or more GPUs.