briansHewy Brian,
some random thoughts:brianssorry, how did you come up with this 50gb number? Is that something you got from XPU? Or some other package? XPU only loads the data it needs onto GPU (demand-loading), so it might make use of less GPU ram than you initially think.
In fact the final render readout on a single layer with these trees is 50 gb of vram for a single frame
XPU will go out-of-core for textures, although the GPU will most likely run very slowly in this state.
On Windows, GPU memory will spill over to CPU memory (called "Shared memory") and seems to be still rather performant in this case. Please note this will not work on Linux, or if you have 2 GPUs.
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5490/~/system-memory-fallback-for-stable-diffusion [nvidia.custhelp.com]
Apologies for the delayed response. I have since updated to houdini 20. Now the readout in the clone is not indicating an optix of zero..... It is still utilizing the gpus (at least one of them), even with the load memory peaking at 39 GBs.
I've attached a pick. thank you for your insights, and helping me resolve some of my own ignorance.