Vegas 17! No More GPU driver crashes. Page File Bug. Workaround

LongIslander wrote on 4/18/2020, 4:34 AM

After months and months of trying to import large projects unsuccessfully into Vegas 16 and 17 I have finally found the issue and a workaround...

I noticed that anytime my vegas would crash/crash during import my "committed ram" was maxing out.

Committed ram is a combination of the physical ram your system has PLUS the page file.

Windows by default will generally match your page file size with your physical ram size. IE. I personally have 16gb of ram so windows assigned a 16gb page file giving me 32 GB of “committed ram”

So in dealing with all these crashes I decided to go into my system settings and max out my page file which for me was 172GB. Surely enough Vegas 16 was now able to handle my large imports; 17 did improve but it seems the memory use/coding in 17 is substantially worse . (17 just uses absurds amount of memory)

IE. In some cases the GPU driver crashes users are receiving on vegas 17 are not related at all to the GPU. The GPUs are crashing because the system is running out of committed memory that the drivers need to operate.

Conclusion...

As it stands right now; Vegas has a major dependence on page file usage that in my opinion is the root cause of program instability. You can see screen shots below of V16 using 122GB out of my allocated 172GB of page file for my project. V17 simply ran out of memory and maxed out to 172GB for the same project and crashed. Additionally if you click out of a Vegas window, the entire page file will dump, (v17 surprisingly does not👍) thus when you click back on a vegas windows; it has to reload the entire memory page causing a slow down. I uploaded the entire project to the team via support ticket. Hopefully this helps out the coders and fellow users.

I am now able to import large projects into Vegas 16 and Vegas 17 without any crashing because I increased the page file...

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 4/18/2020, 9:39 AM

Increasing page file size helps some users but it is not a silver bullet for many file import issues. Thanks for sharing your experience and welcome to the forum.

Kinvermark wrote on 4/18/2020, 12:10 PM

Good work @LongIslander. Maybe not the issue for all, but this is the kind of post that advances the thinking.

It goes some way to explaining why some users have constant problems, while others happily work away with little or no issue. I have never had much difficulty with Vegas (or other programs), but guess where my pagefile resides: a very large, fast RAID array. Users on laptops invariably have the pagefile on the system drive, and seem coincidentally to be more likely to experience problems.

wilvan wrote on 4/19/2020, 12:58 AM

Most interesting find , pagefile ..... instead of RAM .. also when there is 128 GB of RAM ? Gonna test this next week , for fun

RogerS wrote on 4/19/2020, 2:44 AM

The GPU driver crashes users are receiving on vegas 17 are NOT related at ALL to the GPU

That may be true for some, thanks for your investigation. I've gotten crashes with just 3 clips on a timeline (doing tests) and Vegas doesn't use much of the available ram let alone the pagefile (11gb out of 32gb available ram used). Vegas is still usable, I just have to be careful and save a lot.

JN- wrote on 4/19/2020, 8:37 PM

I checked this idea in another use case, (not where importing a large file size amount, glad that works for that, good find), in the VP17 memory issue when rendering out the 4K Benchmarking project to uhd. This fails unless dynamic ram preview is changed from 200 to 0, on my laptop, it renders ok on my PC without this fix. 32gb on my PC , 16gb on my laptop. The “fail” is when using nvenc HW encoding, not CPU only encoding.

Anyway, changing the pagefile size didn’t fix things in this rendering use case issue.

I don’t have to apply this render issue fix in vp16, vp17 has memory issues for sure, render times are also slower.

I'm getting an extra 16gb of ram for the laptop soon, i’ll report back here if that fixes the render issue or not in vp17.

Meant to say that actually vp17 gives a low on memory error even though there’s plenty of memory.

fr0sty wrote on 4/20/2020, 12:51 AM

^Keep in mind "low memory" doesn't necessarily mean "low system RAM", it can mean "low GPU VRAM" as well.

IE. The GPU driver crashes users are receiving on vegas 17 are NOT related at ALL to the GPU. T

If this were true, then updating drivers would never solve problems for many users, which it does. Still, good job on tracking down the cause for some users.

ByronK wrote on 4/20/2020, 1:26 AM

This is interesting. I've been just living with the constant freeze ups and crashes by saving a lot. Haven't b!+ched about it has been a predominant issue for me since VP15 i'm using VP17. Thanks for sharing. (:

fr0sty wrote on 4/20/2020, 2:56 AM

Have you made any threads about it seeking help? We might be able to get rid of some by suggesting things you haven't tried yet.