Rolling back to beta 9 is really hard (please give us just a zip file for install), so I haven’t done a side by side, but shadows seem to be going really slow in beta 10.
I have about 43 million particles in one loader and one fspot. The fspot has a map setting of 512 pixels and the render is using final pass density for lighting density (no override). Draw point filter is Bicubic, self-shadow filter is Nearest Neighbor. Render image is 864x486
First I do a render with PCache on (LCache off) to remove the overhead of the particle loading off the network.
Render time 9:02.
Second, cached, render takes 3:41.
Turn off lighting and re-render, and the render time drops to 1:36.
Considering that both renders had to load the particles off the network, the lighting seems to be taking an aweful long time. 512 with nearest neighbor should be really fast, no?
If you’re hitting swap space, then things will definitely get slow, but not necessarily crash. You can check the task manager during a slow render to see if it’s hitting swap space.
One light. Just the fspot. And the map was 512, which makes it comparable to my final render frame.
I did another test while watching taskman. Memory creeps up to 2.5GB, then drops to 500MB. VM Size went to about 3.3GB. So that may be the problem. Turn off light, and everything fits?
That seemed to help. Extra couple gigs is nice. 80 million particles rendered OK.
But I think there’s more bugs to find. Had one render where PRT loader visibility was <1 and got no color. I’m moving to beta 12 now, and I’ll keep eyes open.