RAM 32GB or 64GB?
tattooedillusions
Posts: 152
Right now I have your average, run of the mill, 16GB, great for gaming memory installed. But I have more than a few environments that are heavy on trees & plants that I would like to use but can't even navigate the viewport because it's so memory intense. I'm buying new components for a beastly uprade and was wondering if 32GB would be good enough to move the camera around in the viewport of some of these environments or should I go with 64? If I go with 64, the only option is to fill up all 4 slots on my Maximus IX Code Z270 board but I've heard that it's not good for the memory controller or something like that. Does anyone out there have all slots filled and if so do you experience any issues?
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The question that needs to be asked before you decide on 32 or 64 GB of RAM... Since you are looking at aaround $250 for 2x16GB of DDR4 from a good name brand.
What GPU are you getting for this biuld.
The GPU and VRAM will have a much larger impact on your scene performance than 32GB vs 64GB of system RAM.
Hey James I'm going to get a 1080ti and money isn't really an issue for stuff since I'm kind of going piece by piece instead of trying to save for everything at once.
Just making sure that you are not sacrificing video card power to get more system RAM.
Though if money isn't an issue, why are you not going for a LGA 2066 X299 motherboard and Core i9 CPU, or a Ryzen Threadripper setup?
Both of those would get you quad channel memory and 8 slots to fill, and more CPU threads for CG work to use..
If you are getting screen lag due to scenes with a lot of trees etc, this is not going to be solved with more RAM. Assuming that Daz Studio could load the scene with the 16GB you do have, then the lag is likely to be caused by the CPU rather than memory access. There are some performance options you can play with that should help with lag issues as well. I had one of Andrey Pestryakov's nature sets bring my PC to a crawl when it was loaded, but after manipulating the settings it improved dramatically.
James - Yeah that's the bad thing about going piece by piece instead of all at once. I had gotten the Code & the i7 7700 shortly before the i9's game out and of course when I heard there were new goodies coming out rage insued lol.
Havos - I always read that screen lag in the viewport was due to RAM. If I were in iray preview mode and get lag then I would guess gpu or cpu but just the regular viewport I always heard it was because of not enough memory. What settings did you change around to get those Andrey enviroments to work? Might give that a shot because those are some of the ones I would like to use.
If the memory was very low, then yes, memory could be an issue, but in this case the lag would be truely dreadful as everything would be being swapped in and out of virtual memory.
The product I was testing with was tropical pond by Andrey. The relevant settings can be seen by clicking on Edit->Preferences, and then selecting the Interface tab.
Here there is a setting called "Display Optimization". Ensure this is set to "Best", I think the default setting is "None".
Once I did this the lag pretty much disappeared (at least on that set).
Well I have 64GB and honestly I"m not sure I really need it.
One of my biggest pains in Studio is the Iray screen lag, and I'm fairly certain it's not related to the amount of RAM. The biggest factor is whether you are in Perspective View or Camera View. Well, maybe not the biggest, but it's a big factor. Response is much faster in Perspective View than Camera View (presumably due to the additional calculations that are required for Camera View and Headlamp etc.).
And when the view is calculating the actual Iray image (the grainy image, not the Texture Shaded image that it might revert to when you move the view), it's 100% GPU utilization, but ony 10-20% utilization of my 16 CPU threads (Ryzen 7 1700), which is about what it is when the view isn't changing. Which also makes me think the 3D View is semi-unrelated to CPU usage. Heck, if it's not super snappy with 8 cores/16 threads, then I doubt the CPU is much of a factor.
I think the real benefit of RAM is how many RAM-intensive apps you can run simultaneously and how large a scene you can load into Studio, stuff like that.
Anyway, I'm still pretty clueless about the correct "Draw" settings for the fastest 3D View response, so I could be way off on most of this...
By the way, if anyone knows the magic formula for super-snappy 3D View Iray response I'd be eternally grateful.
Right now when I move the Camera View it jumps back to Texture Shading mode for maybe 10 seconds then starts the Iray re-draw. Very annoying. And that's with a Ryzen 7 1700 (3.2GHz, 8 CPU's/16 threads), 64GB RAM, GTX 1070 w/ 8GB VRAM.
To reduce the IRay preview lag, then you need to go into the Draw Settings Pane, switch the DrawStyle to NVIDIA Iray, and then look at the "Drawing" options
Change "Response Threshold (msec)" to a much bigger value, like 5000. The "Inactive Viewport Delay" should be "Off"
I find with these settings the scene refreshes much more quickly, and you avoid the long periods where the whole view goes grey.
What are some of the high system memory hogging scenes? I don't have Tropical Pond by Andrey.
I will build a system in a few more weeks or so, I will see if there are any Labor Day deals plus I'm waiting to see about the new Intel chips and the Threadripper 1900x. I have 48 GB of RAM, not sure I'm really using it. 32GB may be enough. DDR4 is pretty expensive, going from 32 to 64 GB adds quite a bit.
Cool. thanks. That helps a lot. At least now it doesn't jump into the "gray" mode before redrawing the Iray.
There's still like a 3-4 second delay between rotating the view and it responding (in Camera View). But in Perspective View it's almost immediate, maybe 1 second delay.
AWESOME !!
Havos, you friggin' genius, the Display Optimization setting of Best worked LOL. I just tested a couple of sets like Jackson's farm and On the Shore and I'm now able to look around without any lag whatsoever! Thank you for saving me a lot of money! Still going to upgrade to 2 sticks of 16GB (32GB total) to see if that helps with the dreaded "You computer is running out of memory and has to shut programs down" error I get once in a while but at least now I know I don't need 64GB. Many thanks Havos!
Yes, I definitely vote Havos for Mostest Awesomest Person of the Year.
I was actually really close to considering buying a $500+ second GPU (GTX 1080) mostly to speed up the 3D View. But now that's not nearly as big an issue.
A second card still might speed up the Camera View, but even that isn't nearly as bad as before.
I'm thinking we declare August 19 as International Havos Day
Hey wait a minute...
What are you talking about "Display Optimization = Best"? Havos didn't say anything about that, and I can't find that under Draw Settings...
About 8 or 9 posts up Havos mentioned it lol. I quoted it and put that section of the comment in bold
That error message may also be caused by a too small swap file. Try to increase the size to e.g. 8 GB or more and see if that helps.
Well, all modesty aside, like all the best tips, I learned about the "Display Optimization = Best" from an earlier thread in these forums. Whilst the available documentation for Daz Studio has undergone quite a bit of critism (with some justification) being able to pick the brains of fellow users like we do here is such a useful asset to have
Edit: I do wonder why the default for this setting is None, I can only assume that on some people's machines a setting of Best can cause issues.
I have 32 GB in my box, and so far I have found it adequate, but moving up from 16 is always a good idea, particularly if you are running multiple other apps (web browsers etc) at the same time.
Pretty much any of Andrey's sets when all vegetation is showing can cause lag. As I mentioned before, lack of memory is not the only issue. The problem is the huge number of polygons in the display port, and as you rotate the camera Daz Studio has to work out what you should see in the new camera angle, and all those millions of polygons will complicate that problem. This is why efficent settings are very important.
Actually the Display Optimization = Best didn't seem to have any effect in the response time when navigating my 3D View. Though the other settings made a HUGE difference.
Maybe the Display Optimization is a function of installed RAM?
LOL yeah that's definitely me. Seems like I always have around 5 windows open ("Open in new window" OCD I guess lol), Daz rendering, image editing program, steam ap, origin ap, etc all at the same time haha.
The display optimization is for OpenGL display (like Texture Shaded), the other settings mentioned are Iray specific.
My largest scenes use 24gb and that is with 5-6 figures and a setting. 32gb is good if you have nothing else too intensive open. If you want to multi task and use other sofware like photoshop or do other editing software alongside daz would go with no less than 48gb.
Yeah, I'm using 34GB now rendering a pretty large scene, Photoshop open and copying some files.
...where more memory and memory channels do come into play is when rendering in CPU mode. I have only 12 GB (actually 10.7 after Windows and system utilities) and often have render processes dump to even much slower swap mode (HDD) as having the scene open in Daz also takes up valuable physical memory. One scene I have tops out at 8.9 GB (9 figures, several emissive lights, and a wet fog effect) when open leaving me less than 2 GB for rendering (yeah, feel like i'm back in the old 32 bit days). My GPU card is an old 1 GB GT 460 (which is only good for running the displays), and with prices for the 1070 still have not having stablised enough for my purposes, won't be doing any GPU rendering any time soon. For now trying to get a 24 GB tri channel DDR3 kit for the current system to get a little "breathing room". I estimate that just being able to keep the process in physical memory, could easily shave off a significant amount of render time as well as reduce wear and tear on the HDD.
I am also designing a high memory (128 GB) workstation with dual 8 core Xeon CPUs as I also work in Carrara as well as mess around with Vue Infinite, neither of which natively support GPU rendering. Why so much memory? There is one person here who had one of the old Mac Pros (when they still used a real tower case) with dual 6 core Xeons and 64 GB of memory which he could bring to its knees with a large scale render job, similar to the type of scenes I do. For myself, better to overbuild and have the overhead available than not have it for those times it's needed.
...yeah a lot of times I also have GIMP open for modifying texture files and creating various maps.
For those that have low end systems like me :) or those that like to cram a ton of massive sets into a single scene with hundreds of figures
1 methos I use to get around a scene when it starts lagging big time is to switch to wireframe view. I do as much as I can in that view, then switch to texture shaded to make sure poses and such look right before switching back and continuing setup.