OVITO Elevated RAM Usage on macos with Ambient Occlusion

OVITO
1

Hello everyone,

I recently switched to macos from linux and I have noticed an elevated usage of RAM (>10GB) whenever I load and render trajectory files (~4GB) using Ambient Occlusion. Just visualizing the trajectory with Ambient Occlusion drives up the RAM usage to really high numbers. Even if I delete the trajectory from the existing pipeline the RAM usage does not return to normal levels. This happens when rendering a movie or just visualizing the trajectory on OVITO using Ambient Occlusion modifier. This is a big issue when I have to render multiple movies and I want to keep the same pipeline modifications. I don’t remember facing this issue in Linux.

I am using OVITO Basic (Apple Silicon) 3.11.2
I am using OVITO on a M4 Mac mini with Sequoia 15.1.1

9BEC43E5-4E2F-4EE7-9839-98B75D3D2B07
9BEC43E5-4E2F-4EE7-9839-98B75D3D2B071750×770 165 KB

2

Thanks for reporting this issue. We are investigating the problem and looking for a suitable workaround. It looks like the operating system is not releasing the OpenGL resources the ambient occlusion routine is creating and destroying in a worker thread. The way OVITO is doing this did change with version 3.11.0.

3

Thank you for your response @stukowski. I tried using OVITO 3.10.6 under same conditions and the RAM usage never went above 5 GB so I’ll stick to it for now as a workaround.

4

We’ve implemented a workaround for this issue on the macOS platform. You can find new development builds here. Please give them a try.