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...have you both checked the size of your scene files? If you are rendering that many characters with a lot of detailed textures specularity, emissive lights, or other effects (like fog) it can easily balloon the file size. If you are using a Ryzen CPU then you are having W10 rob nearly 2 GB of VRAM from your GPU card. Again my biggest scene is around 8.6 GB, with only 9.1 GB after W10 (less if you are running multiple displays), that would means it is only 500 MB shy of the card's available VRAM. Add another character, more specularity, more emissive lights and it could be exceed the available VRAM and dump to the CPU. Installing more 100 Ti's will not solve this.as Iray will use the largest single amount of VRAM available and once that is exceeded, having all the CUDA cores in the world will mean nothing.
Yeah, I know it's hard to imagine with a card that powerful but it is possible. For my pruposes a 16 GB Quadro P5000 (running on W7) would pretty much guarnatee 98 to 99% of myscenes staying in VRAM. The rub, that card alone costs about as much as a complete workstation with an 8 core hyperthreading CPU, 32 GB of memory, a couple SSDs/HDDs, and a 1080 Ti.
Wow! this is crazy!!!!! I thought I was doing some big scenes but the biggest scene file I have is 90 mb. It has 5 figures in it, but I cant tell which ones as I only have the render. Then I have a scene with a Genesis 3 Male, Genesis 2 Female, 3 Genesis figures, Liam?, and Daruis 6, and 2 millineium dog les. This scene is file is only 51.3 mbs.
What do you mean by 90mb? The size of the scene duf file on disk (in which case 90 MB would seem too large), the amount of memory used by DS (90 MB would be too small for this), or the size of VRAM used by the GPU (90 MB is also much too low for this)
When I hear scene file, I think of the file as it is saved to disk. I dont know how to tell how much memory a daz scene uses. Sorry for my ignorance.
Sorry...but that size is NOT what is being fed to the video card's memory. All of the textures for all those figures are going to make a huge dent in the memory.
OK...I'm learning here. I know this isn't what gets loaded into memory. How do you find the amount of memory used by a scene file?
I'm sure. I run Nvidia Inspector with the graph open for a real-time monitor as that is easy peasy. Both cards GPUs 99-100% usage.
Thanks Scott!!
When I start D|S, my GPU memory usage jumps from 250 MB to 2.2GB (Windows 10 machine w/ GTX 1070). When I load a large Stonemason city scene with a G3 in it and with the 3D view set to texture shaded, the memory jumps to 2.4GB. When I set the 3D view to Iray render, as soon as it makes the first grainy Iray image it jumps to almost 3.6 GB.
The DUF file for that scene is only 18 MB. So all the other resources it loads equals about 1.4 GB in GPU VRAM.
BTW, this is using GPU-Z app...
On a slightly different topic, if your scene file is 90MB it is likely you have some mesh info stored in your scene file. This is not a big issue, all should work as normal, but it does mean that each time you press save it will take longer to save the scene, as well as of course bloating the space taken on your disk.
The main thing causing scene file bloat is when you autofit clothing, as then the details of the autofitted mesh is stored in the scene file. To get around this, you can save the autofitted item as a new figure/prop asset, the delete it, and re-add it using the duf file you created when you saved it. After this the scene file will be smaller, and will save quicker. Most scene files should be no more than 1-2MB or less.
Thanks for the info ebergerly and Havos! For the first time, I plan on building my next pc exclusively primarily for DAZ Studio. I always just bought what I could afford , usually around 1600 bucks every 6 to 7 years. This time, I plan on doubling that budget. I have been saving for awhile now, so I have been looking at hardware and such. Reading the forums here has been an experience and hopefully, I will be able to learn what alot of you already know. For the longest time, all I worried about was understanding how to do this, and how to do that. Then it was all about making my pictures look better. Now, that I am somewhat decent in my work with DAZ Studio, I want to learn the backside of things so that when I purchase my next parts to build my PC, I not only will have a powerful machine to render quickly, but the knowledge to work smarter.I appreciate everyone teaching me what they know and educating me.
I found a program called CPU Shark. I will check out GPU Z app. As far as my file bloat, I am not surprised. I use autofit alot and thought nothing of it. I also take models and load them up into hexagon and do modifications and remap and then export them out as obj. I am sure I am not doing something right as I am still learning the ins and outs of modeling. I don't pay attention to file size or optimization only, "Ok that works and I can texture it."
Wow!! 88mb of bloat! Thats way messed up! I will definitely have to look into saving objects as a new figure or prop. Thanks!
Now I got to find those posts talking about when a file is loaded and takes more memory than the GPU can hold...Thanks for your info and please feel free to send me links to info you think I might find useful or hardware/builds.
...did you get that from just looking at either the the Scenes or Scene Subsets folder? if so that is the file in its compressed state which is how the file is saved to disk. When open in Daz it will be much larger. The easiest way to check this is opne the scene in Daz then pull up task manger and look at how much memory is being used. The Daz programme itself takes something like 185 MB when open with no scene. Subtract that from the total and that will be the "uncompressed" scene file size
Thank You kyoto kid!!! I really appreciate you taking the time to educate me. I got that number from the file in windows explorer. Havos explained file bloat and that is why I believe my scene files are so large. The next project I do I am going to focus on file size, VRAM usage, etc. I am also going to put something together to extract data from the log file and analyze the VRAM from there. Even though it is post process, it is some sort of Memory Management. Also, if you know of any other links that you think I might be interested in concerning the log files or VRAM, please send them to me!! Much appreciation for your Help!!
...using the logfile and/or task manger are the two methods I know of. Windows TM is the simplest t get a "ballpark" figure. As to file bloat that can be caused by a number of sutiations. One thing I periodically do while working (particularly since I swap between the different scene element files) is to purge system memory and clear the undo stack after closing one scene/scene subset file before opening the next (there should be scripts for this in Scripts/Utilities).
The other way to do this is to close down Daz and reopen it again. but depending on your setup and system that can be more time consuming,
As I create fairly "epic" size in poly and texture weight, scenes, I am not yet fully taken in by GPU rendering. Some people will suggest to reduce the texture resolution in a 2D programme, but in a big scene like I usually work on, that can end up as diminishing returns time wise. As I mentioned I look at 16 GB as being the optimal amount which would allow 99% - 100% of my scenes to remain in VRAM. Unfortunately Nvidia only offers that in their more expensive Quadro line (the P5000 at around 2,500$).
Awesome! Thanks kyoto kid!!
As already stated GPU-Z is the one of the best ways of seeing how much VRAM your scene will use, but this is of no use if your scene exceeds the VRAM you have and dumps to CPU rendering using normal memory. In this case, this is a useful script to have:
https://www.daz3d.com/iray-memory-assistant
It will estimate how much VRAM you need before you render. It is not a 100% accurate, but it is pretty close. Best of all it tells you which objects and/or textures are eating up most of the memory, so you know which are the ones you can concentrate on when trying to reduce memory usage.
Another nice script to have that helps reduce memory usage in both Daz Studio, and VRAM, is this one:
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
It will reduce the resolution of textures you feel are in the background, or much higher resolution than needed for a particular scene. The memory savings from this can be pretty dramatic, and if used selectively should have little or no effect on the final image quality.
The scripts might seem expensive at full price, but worth wishlisting for a later sale (eg the upcoming PA sale)
Thanks Havos! I appreciate your time as well! I have added those scripts to my wish list as well as noting the ones Kyoto Kid informed me of. I will definetly use all of this to get a handle on my scenes and VRAM. I am investing in a new computer soon so I want to be able to take advantage on utilizing the hardware correctly.
Thanks guys!
Indeed, once your'e in CPU mode the need to save memory is less important, unless your machine is resource contrained and the renderer needs to use virtual memory during rendering, at which point progress would indeed be glacial.
While I cannot state for you your own experiences, I can point out what I consider to be a possible misconception in your manner of thinking. My opinion is that Octane isnt better at exteriors and Iray isnt necessarily better at interiors, the rendering algorithms these two applications use don't care about interior or exterior status.
Firstly, gone are the days when individual rendering engines produced wildly different results. Images might be faster in one engine or other, but the level of final quality should not vary by much. Though Path Tracing and PMC are fully unbiased kernels in Octane, Iray is not truly unbiased but it is at least a PBR engine which means it is very nearly unbiased. Considering this fact....it comes down to the user, not the software. Very very very few people can look at two identical renders from two different PBR engines and know for certain in which engine it was rendered. A lot like pop singers of the current day who all master melisma and therefore all sound the same when we close our eyes..Iray and Octane are doing so many things that are the same that it is not useful to try to draw any broad comparisons about them in regards to one another. For example I would argue that exterior scenes are much easier to set up in Octane than Iray because Octane comes with a sun and sky system that is very robust, moreso than Iray out of the box. Iray however does have the options to make skies like those in Octane but the user must find them and set them up. Interior scenes on the other hand, no matter the engine, require lighting set-up far beyond most exterior scenes require. Since most Iray scenes come with the lighting already sorted out by the PA, I think it can lend an unfair seeming advantage to Iray with interior lighting and rendering speed. What I'm saying is that there are no situations I have seen personally where Iray is easier to set up starting from nothing to something than Octane. Octane is far more user friendly with both materials and lighting than Iray...that Iray if not for PA's shortening the learning curve, I think very few people would be getting on very far with Iray.
That said, do keep using Iray, but use it for both interior and exterior scenes as needed. I suggest the same with Octane. Once scenes are optimized properly for the specific engine, the quality and render time will be quite similar between Octane and Iray...all cuda based applications using the same hardware and code under the hood..... What I am doing now is willfully trying to produce the same results in both Octane and Iray and so far I have been able to find perfect equivalence every time, with much effort mind you, but I can see that final results can be impossible to tell apart, both interior and exterior shots. And while Octane is usually a bit faster, Iray holds its own well enough in my view, both interior and exterior.
+1
Actually not quite true with Octane, no mega GPU memory needed. Unlike Iray, Octane can use out of core memory (system RAM) for rendering with only the GPU (not CPU bound). If your render doesn't fit in GPU memory with Iray, you dump to CPU. So, with Octane you could render a scene that needs say 14Gb on a GPU with 4-8 Gb with a less than $600 investment in software VS spending $2000 on a Quadro P5000. You could even buy a 1080ti (~1,000 more Cuda cores than a P5000) plus Octane, get faster renders and easily save $600 over buying a P5000. Seems to me if you have huge scenes, Octane is much cheaper than the the "free" Iray in DS, of course YMMV.