Many of the people have asked almost the same question. I'm trying to render a big mesh + fur/grass file with a few characters on the screen.

when I hit render, after a number of processing, copying data to gpu etc... i get following error.

Mem: 2960.07M, Peak:2960.07M | CUDA error: Out of memory in cuMemAlloc(&device_pointer, size).

I'm using Geforce GTX 690 which contains 4GB memory.

Can somebody tell me how can i get GPU rendering, while 2960M is far less then 4196M of memory.

I know somebody would suggest me to use CPU.. but i'm curios why not GPU?

I've already compressed texture, etc

Many of the people have asked almost the same question. I'm trying to render a big mesh + fur/grass file with a few characters on the screen.

when I hit render, after a number of processing, copying data to gpu etc... i get following error.

Mem: 2960.07M, Peak:2960.07M | CUDA error: Out of memory in cuMemAlloc(&device_pointer, size).

I'm using Geforce GTX 690 which contains 4GB memory.

Can somebody tell me how can i get GPU rendering, while 2960M is far less then 4196M of memory.

I know somebody would suggest me to use CPU.. but i'm curios why not GPU?

I've already compressed texture, etc

Edited

I don't think any other application is using any of my 1GB remaining memory. everything is closed but blender is there, also the GPU utilities are showing 2000/2000 MB are free on one card and 1900/2000MB is free on 2nd card.

i'm using GTX 690. with two GPUs of 2GB each. If somebody thinks that one GPU should have memory matching to the cuda memory/or Peak memory then I'm doubtful. Because in preferences Blender does know that I have 2GPUs where I can select either first GPU or second GPU or even both.

When I render some of smaller objects/scenes both of my GPU renders simultaneously with two blocks.

I'm running following specs

Xeon E5-1660 0 24GB - 1600mhz GTX690