Summary of Issue
We recently discovered an issue with Nvidia’s Studio Driver 442.92 that causes significantly longer than normal rendering times while using Arnold’s new GPU renderer within 3ds Max. In some cases, the render times are twice as long as they should be. The issue impacts all CPUs we’ve tested, but is particularly hard on AMD CPUs.
We’ve also tested other GPU renderers such as V-Ray, Octane, and Redshift, but the issue is only seen in Arnold’s GPU rendering mode.
If we compare rendering times on Studio Driver 442.92 with the recently released Studio Driver 451.48, these are the render times we see:
Render times on the same scene with Studio Driver 442.92 in blue and 451.48 in green. In some cases, render times were doubled while using 442.92. Updating your driver is highly recommended.
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Studio Drivers prior to 442.92 show similar results to 451.48, so it appears to be isolated to the one release.
The Fix
Luckily the fix is pretty easy. Update to Studio Driver 451.48. After you update, you’ll need to pre-populate the GPU Cache, either manually or by rendering a single frame while in GPU mode. (GPU Cache must be rebuilt for every driver update)
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Alternatively, if you do not want to update to the recently released driver, rolling back to the previous version 442.19 will also fix rendering times. It may reintroduce other issues fixed in later drivers, but sometimes the problems you know are better than the problems you don't know.
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