Scene Memory Optimization Wizard

donovancolbert

While I admire DAZ's committment to keeping the hardware indsutry profitable, there are many of us who cannot afford a top end system with DSLI video cards with heaps of memory and a bajillion CUDA cores. 

I have just realized how frequently a complex scene requires dropping out of GPU and into CPU mode, and I think I've got a rough idea of some of the most common fixes. 

Those seem to be removing complex textures and replacing them with shaders, reducing resolution and polygon count, and performing renders in layers to be combined afterwards in a paint program. 

It seems like it would be possible, either natively in DAZ itself, or through a third party PA plugin, to automate many of these tasks when a scene exceeds the memory available on the GPU card in a particular system. 

I would imagine a tick box in the render pane, "Enable scene optimization for low GPU memory," that might have several more checkboxes beneath it. 

Optimize to reduce polygon complexity

Perform render in layers

And whatever else can work directly with the scene independent of specific content in the user's library (so, replacing textures with shaders would still be on the artist.) 

You wouldn't want it to be a default, non-user option, because some people might not know how to combine output layers in post work, or might not have the software necessary to do that - but it seems like an automated process for many of these things might be more efficient than a human trying to figure out where to divide things up to best reduce memory to fully optimize their scene if they're on a GPU card with less than 4GB. 

The added bonus is that the people with cards with less than 4GB , probably with less than 8GB, are probably among the least experienced DAZ artists - so they're the ones who would benefit from such a feature most directly. If you've got a 12GB Quadra in your Xeon i7, you're probably not doing this as a hobby. If you've got a Geforce 750ti, these concepts are pretty complex and you don't understand why your renders take so darn long to finish. 

Anyhow, it seems like a feature I would love to see either native, or as a plug-in. 

Mattymanx

While textures do take up more memory then a mesh, it is wise to look over your scene and remove any prop that will not be seen at all so that neither it nor its texture is loaded in to VRAM.  This will help a lot when using sets from Stonemason and Jack Tomlin.