Crashes with ray-tracing

Hey there,
So as most people know, Nvidia released drivers that allow us, poor GTX users, to use DXR features without having to own RTX cards. Luckily this also means that ray-tracing features of Unreal became available to us, but unfortunately it seems to be very crash-happy (GTX1080 in my case). In another thread on this forum, it seems to be an issue with almost all GTX users that are trying to use ray-tracing. Sooo, my question is, is this something that Epic is aware of and are trying to fix it or implement a better support for GTX cards or not? Or is it purely Nvidia issue?
I understand GTX cards weren’t meant to be RTX capable, and obviously I should not expect any great performance with it, but as someone who makes only cinematics with Unreal, it would be nice to be able to use it with Sequencer to render it out :stuck_out_tongue:
Ray-traced shadows and reflections are pretty much the only thing that still makes me want to go back to V-Ray sometimes, so making this actually work would be fantastic and I’ll never look back ever again :smiley:

I’d give Epic and Nvidia more time. Ray tracing is still in an experimental state, and the RTX GPUs got much more development time to work out the bugs. It’s been 2 weeks for the 1000 series.

Indeed, that’s what I’m thinking. But it’s also possible that Epic will just ignore the GTX ray-tracing issues as this wasn’t really ever meant to be a feature for GTX cards.
That said, I think a Creator Ready Driver from Nvidia will be the fix to the issues, whenever that will be released.

We want the experience on all DXR-compatible cards to be solid (no crashes). If there are reliable reproduction steps / scenes that would allow us to get the crash in-house, I’m confident a solution could be found quickly.

My advice would be to try turning off all individual ray tracing features via ConsoleVariables.ini and then turn them on one by one to narrow down the problematic system. You can also try setting [FONT=courier new]r.RayTracing.EnableMaterials=0 and see if that improves stability. To help narrow down the source of crash further, you can enable NVIDIA Aftermath via [FONT=courier new]r.GPUCrashDebugging=1 in ConsoleVariables.ini or [FONT=courier new]-gpucrashdebugging on the command line. When a crash occurs, additional diagnostic data should be written to the log file.

It’s probably mostly going to be an Nvidia thing

@YuriODonnell Is there some kind of known issues with using sliders and DXR culminating in fancy crashes or at the very least insane time-outs? Ie, -for example whenever I adjust a Skylight HDRI intensity, a material slider that drives something more complex than the odd simple adjustment or whatever via slider control (meaning actually moving the slider), I always always run into the editor timing out. As if DXR just thinks I want to update the thing 5000 times all at once. If I punch in the value with manual increments I have no such issues.

raytracing on GTX cards seems to be a known issue and some suggest just to keep loading until it does not crash anymore. Given it’s a first offering as far as GTX cards goes you kind of have to accept the conditions as a first adopter :wink:

It is definitely possible to overwhelm any GPU by cranking settings up to 11. We currently don’t enforce any maximum values for any quality CVars that would protect against causing a GPU timeout. We will probably add that in the future though.

Having said that, adjusting HDRI intensity should not incur any extra ray tracing cost, so it’s not obvious why you’re seeing issues.

Nevertheless, we’d love to get a solid way to reproduce the GTX issues in-house to actually understand what’s going on and fix the underlying issue. Is there a particular scene that is more likely to cause a crash than others?

Hello, I just found this topic, GTX 1080 Ti, latest drivers (tested creator and game ready) Windows 10 1903 clean installed with full data wipe.
When I try to enable the Ray Tracing renderer and reload the project (the blank one with just the table and the chair) it says video drivers have stopped working and it crashes.
Unreal Engine 4.23 preview 8

Hope it helps.

And the culprit waaaaaas…

Riva Tuner Statistics Server !

When the process is active, even when no framerate limiting or UI monitoring is present, it crashes, if I disable framerate monitoring in MSI afterburner, and therefore disable RTSS, it works.

Thanks! That resolved my issue! Riva Tuner Statistics Server was crashing my game when running it with RTX ON.