Simonv
Is out of core a planned feature...?
Yes we have it planned, but it is a while away, and will most likely come in stages over the next year or two.
eg
1. demand-loaded textures (meaning unused tiles or hi-res miplevels will not get loaded)
2. out-of-core textures (ie eviction of old textures when memory hits maximum)
3. out-of-core geometry
The problem with out-of-core is that its easy to reach a situation where you're spending more time paging textures/geometry on-off the GPU than you are actually rendering (ie thrashing). So its a tricky feature to get working correctly.
If you're needing to get work done in the short term I would suggest buying another GPU with oddles of memory, as you say.
Simonv
The viewport retains it's memory footprint as long as it's visible.
No_ha
The memory metadata reached above 80GB although I'm not sure if this means truly 80Gbs being processed.
Have you been using the memory stats in the viewport?
They give a fairly accurate reading for GPU memory usage.
Although we currently have viewport buffer memory combined in the "other" category with some other stuff... perhaps we should consider breaking that out to its own explicit category.
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html#howto [
www.sidefx.com] ("Display device and render stats in the viewport" section)
Another thing to keep in mind is that once HoudiniGL has been activated, it will allocate GPU memory and keep hold of it (even when made inactive again).
So to further maximise your GPU memory I would suggest...
- saving your scene with KarmaXPU as the selected renderer
- restarting houdini
- loading the scene again, and render, without activating houdiniGL
cheers