Memory Management / Optimization

[antonyebl]

I was wondering if someone could point to some information (theoretical numbers) on GPU rendering memory use so one can plan and optimize scene accordingly, without having to resort to personal tests.

I found the following post by Johaness on FStormgroup facebook page;

-Polys doesn't take much memory really, even better since there can often be some instancing done.

-File size doesn't matter, a compressed JPG and a raw TIF will eat just as much gpu memory. Bit depth and texture resolution are the only two factors that matters and it's not rare that people use 16-bit textures which is totally unncessesary, and also using bumpmaps and spec-maps that are 8bits instead of greyscale.

In Cycles (Blender) manual it says "for example, 8k, 4k, 2k and 1k image textures take up respectively 256MB, 64MB, 16MB and 4MB of memory."
Would this be the same for FStorm?

Thanks for any pointers

[mitviz]

actually geometry does matter, i proved that for myself, even with instancing, textures are easily optimised but i would say majority of the memory usage goes to geometry, more geometry more memory to quantify it, hard to say, i had a 12 mill scene using about 2.5 gigs of vram so maybe that is some measure, am now using that as basis to plan