Yes. We support this by default. The on-disk
framebuffers were designed to allow many
framebuffers, rather than large framebuffers, since it maps the entire
thing in
memory when accessed (be it when a tile is written to it, or when it
needs to
write the whole thing to disk).
The difference is that the on-disk framebuffers
do not obey regular memory limits and so forcing your memory
consumption down (using
max memory) will probably help mental to map the framebuffer into
memory by
ensuring that there’s always some free memory to map into.
This problem (not being able to map) often
shows up as the warning “Failed to receive tiles” while rendering,
which results in missing/black tiles.
Avoid using EXR when using large
framebuffers since there’s the off-chance that EXR needs to allocate
memory of equal size, at which point you’ll be hosed. Use a pure
streamable format like TGA or even one of mental ray’s own (CT) and
then
convert using imf_copy.
