I am wondering if there has been a change in the way GPU VRAM is managed during an IRay render.
I have a utility called GPU-Z and I have used it ever since I bought my 1070 GPU with 8GB VRAM. I used to be able to judge when I was getting close to the limit by watching the utility report the memory usage as the scene loads and the render starts. However, what I appear to be seeing now is that the memory usage leaps to near maximum suggesting that I can't add more characters to the scene. However, when I did add another character (total now 3), the memory in use hardly changed. I am pretty certain that was not the case when I first bought the card.
Just to be sure, I tried the scene with a single character and no props, clothing or buildings/rooms and the total memory was more than half the total 8GB. The easy conclusion is that adding all those props and two more clothed characters would send the memory way over the limit but it didn't. I can only assume that there is some on-th-fly compression going on.
