Unable to start rendering engine, Ray Tracing Crashes 3D Stager on a RTX 3080

[3Dist]

Hi, 

I have been a lot of performance issues lately followed by a crash on a fairly powerful machine when I turn on Ray Tracing (medium quality). It does essentially render the scene but very slowly and if I move my camera slightly with Ray Tracing on, then the program gives the "Unable to start rendering engine" error and then crashes.

Granted I have more assets than usual (about 10 assets mostly from the free library inside 3D Stager) and my file size is about 87 MB, but it shouldn't be struggling this much and/or crash.

I have done the fixes here: https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-stager/common-issues/gpu-rendering-is-disabled.html and I switched my Nvidia drivers to the studio version to try. I have also set 3D Stager under high performance mode in the Nvidia control panel as well, but nothing has worked.

I tried rolling back to older versions, but I cannot use my save with those versions which is frustrating.

My specs are: 

3D stager version: 3.0.3

Windows 11

CPU: AMD 5900X 12core

GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080

Ram: 32gb 

[3Dist]

Update: I kept working on the file and just turn on Ray Tracing to check materials, and I still get the crash but this time I get the same "Unable to start rendering engine" error upon opening my file which closes 3D Stager automatically so now I can't even access my file anymore...I have lost over 7 hours of work if my files are somehow corrupted. Not sure what to do at this point.

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

There was a minor update for Stager 2-3 days ago. May be you will use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool to solve installation issues? I am on game driver for RTX 4060 without any issue.
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

[3Dist]

Hi Ares, I tried what you said with the cleanser tool and I reinstalled all my Adobe programs and my file could open, but after 2-3minutes, I got the same error and 3D Stager closed again, so I'm back to zero.

[3Dist]

Not really a fix, but I ended up exporting my scene and rolling Stager to version 2.1.4 and I no longer have the performance and crashing issues. I can freely move around the scene with Ray Tracing on so there is clearly something going on with version 3+.

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

I vote this conversion and team will take it into consideration.

[michaelk50823497]

Same here with the Quadro RTX 4000. Already trying to get help in the completely ignored by Adobe thread Unable to enable GPU rendering Substance Stager 3.... - Adobe Community - 14661953

[Raymow]

I'm having the same issue - just got a new PC with high specs:

Win 11
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900K 3.20 GHz
64.0 GB RAM
RTX 4090

Version 2.1.4 works fine, version 3.02 and 3.03 give me render errors and freezez in ray tracing...

[Raymow]

This is now resolved with version 3.04!

I can work again.

[3Dist]

Update: While version 3.04 may have resolved the rendering engine issue, however, the performance randomly gets unusable when using Ray Tracing, and a restart is required, it may have something to do with RAM (I have 32gb) but I find it questionable that in a scene with one plastic bottle, Stager is struggling to render a preview with 256 samples.