How to render over 1 billion particles

[zysnow]

I have a flip simulation cached out as points only, and there are round 13 million particles per frame, i want to bump up the particle count at render time with point replicate procedural, say about 100 times more. So the total particles to be rendered will exceed 1 billion. 

 

Unfortunately, mantra can't handle such amount of particles, and houdini crashes. By the way, i have 64g ram. So is it possible to render such massive particles under 64g of ram. 

 

What is the maximum particle count mantra can handle giving that 64g of ram.

[sekow]

did you try to reduce the tiling size? 

[lukeiamyourfather]

The positional data alone for that many particles would be around 16GB not including rendering it or any other related attributes. There really aren't any guidelines for how many particles you can render with a given amount of memory because it depends on a lot of other factors like PBR, attributes, other geometry in the scene, etc. I'd try using shadow maps, non-PBR renderer, delayed load, and go from fewer replicas to more replicas until you run out of memory.

Edited December 11, 2015 by lukeiamyourfather

[fathom]

how much ram did it try to grab?  the point replicate procedural will generally print out info about ram growth as it goes.

[zysnow]

Thank you all!

I want to know the limits with specific amount of memory, and how to pre-calculate the amount of memory needed to render giving amount of particles. So where can i find those informations?