How far can you push your machine with DAZ before it's completely unusable?
Kevin Rye
Posts: 392
I've always been very happy with my 2008 Mac Pro. Back in my "PC days" I used to have to upgrade my machine every year or two just to keep up. When I switched over to the Mac Pro, I was blown away with the performance. I've added more RAM along the way as I've slowly switched over to Pro apps, etc. I also upgraded my graphics card to a ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB in order to use the new Cinema displays.
Still, 5 years later, my Mac Pro is still a complete workhorse.
Until I installed DAZ Studio a month ago.
I manage to create some fairly impressive renders so far. As I get more used to the features of DAZ and add more and more content, the complexity of my scenes is increasing. My latest scene is killing my Mac Pro!
I purchased Aslan Court: Fallen and thought it would be perfect for an epic battle scene. I threw together a quick test image with a few Victorias. I added a bunch of blood and gore in post and was pretty happy with the results. (See below)
I went ahead and dialed it up to 11 and added a good 30 Victorias all decked out in a mix of Centurion armor and Fantasy Fusion wear. I even added a Horse 2 covered in battle gear. I kept adding content until I was happy with what I had.
It then came time to start tweaking, adding lights, etc. As the scene grew more and more complex, the performance of my machine went way down. It's at the point now where it takes a good 45 minutes just to open the file! Test renders have to be done overnight. And it's almost impossible to work within the scene without it lagging. Simple movements or additions take minutes to display on screen.
I checked Activity Monitor and was surprised to see that DAZ was sucking up 6.6 Gigs of RAM! Wow! I only have 8 Gigs! I hopped on Amazon and ordered another 8 Gigs of RAM. I'm hoping that does the trick. Maybe my Mac Pro has met its match!
I can't wait for that RAM to come in so I can see if it helps. I really want to be able to complete this scene without compromising.
So my question is this.....has anyone else figured out how far they can push their machine with DAZ before it's completely unusable? How complex a scene can you make?
I'd love to buy one of the new Mac Pros that's coming out this fall, but something tells me I'm going to have to wait until the next tax rebate comes in.
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Comments
Frankly, 8Gigs is not a lot when dealing with 3D. I've already made scene that took more than 10 Gigs and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
When I upgraded my PC three years ago I went to 12Go and thought it was enough. Now I think that It's better to go up to 32Go if you can do it
RAM is cheap
Now with DS, the problem is that part of the memory is taken by DS to contain the scene geometry and textures and that it takes again some more when rendering. If you can finish your scene with the amount of memory you have then a temporary workaround which would be to render to RIB then install 3delight to render the scene without DS running. The only disavantage of this method is that you'll only get 2 cores rendering but it can also be a good thing since you can begin to work on an other scene
If you don't feel that your renders take too long you don't need to change your Mac. Just add some more RAM
Sidenote I'm on a PC but that doesn't change the conclusion
RAM is king for capacity in a scene, a good graphics card will help quite a bit as well with viewport usability (but even then, make groups so you can toggle visibility for better performance).
CPU just makes the renders go faster. Doesn't change how much you can render at once.
My biggest scene ever: http://adamtls.deviantart.com/art/Urban-Centaur-372197828
The project was started 9/15/2011.
The main scene was saved in 25 revisions.
There were 61 sub-files created that were merged to create the main scene.
There were 42 in-progress renders saved.
The final render took approximately 3 hours on my machine.
At peak, my machine used ~22GB of RAM to render this scene. It was rendered as a SINGLE pass with all items in the scene at the same time.
There are ~26M verts in the scene.
There are 26 Gen4/Genesis figures in the scene.
3 milcat
3 mildog
4 rats
5 crows
4 chickens
1 milhorse
Plants, Buildings, clothes, etc. beyond counting
@Takeo.Kensei
True, RAM is cheap nowadays, but seeing as my Mac Pro is a 2008 model. the 800 MHz RAM is right on that edge of being "legacy". Looks like the prices are starting to creep up. I usually get my RAM from OWC. They're asking for $260 for 2x4GB. I managed to score some on Amazon for $120 (On sale from $350). It's 3rd party stuff, but it had really good reviews. So, fingers crossed.
@adamr001
Nice render. That seems to be on par with what I'm doing. Huge scene, sweet background, tons of Genesis characters. I just hope I can get by with 16GBs of RAM. I might also throw my old video card back in and put my second monitor on it. That might give me back just a little more video RAM for the viewport.
I've got a MacPro 2009 8 core and a MacPro 2012 12 core, both with 32GB RAM.
I've successfully saturated all RAM getting the machine to trash once (was fiddling with render settings a little too much), plus I had tons of reflections, glass and a 1600x900 render.
The first 2 test renders that I did were at 2560x1440. They hadn't done anything after about an hour, so I let them sit overnight. Both times they were done in the morning so I don't know how long they really took.
I had the same problem with my old 32bit PC with DS. It ran poser, zbrush, photoshop at 40 inch by 40 inch 350DPI no problem, but with only one genesis DS was totally unresponsive. Even my newer 64bit PC, DS is very sluggish, while I can do zbrush with trillions of polygons, vue with billions of polygons with no problems.
After a render, you can look in the logfile (Help > Troubleshooting > View Log File) and it will tell you how long the last render took.
Didn't think about that but it's true that Technology evolves fast and old RAM cost more because the produced quantity is lower. Furthermore Apple Hardware cost more than PC Hardware. Good luck
I do what Adam does. Multiple save files and merge them all together. My PC only has 8GB but for the render belows I set my page file to triple my total RAM just to be safe.
24 characters. A mix of Aiko3, Hiro3, M4, V4 and Genesis.
10 Vehicles
UrbanSprawl2.
Of all the bottlenecks you can have, RAM is probably the worst to have. It will cause your disk to thrash as stuff gets swapped in and out in a frenzy. The only good(ish) news with that is that your CPU usage will probably drop (unless you're running a *nix-based system, when you might get high CPU as the swapper processes gear up and head for overdrive trying to identify memory page swap candidates) as the CPU core(s) get starved of data to process.
I've done a few 'kitchen sink' renders but the worst had to be a simple render of the Bar Interior (I think by Soulless Empathy) which I finally cancelled after around 4 or 5 days - I got into the 'the damn thing WILL finish' mindset. That was on my old 8GB machine. I did it again, on my new, 32GB, machine and swiftly saw why as RAM usage climbed slowly, peaking at around 90+% used - and that was just with Daz Studio loaded and the simple scene. No wonder my 'little' 8GB box choked when up to 28GB was actually required.
Is it DDR2 or DDR3 RAM? Either way, you can put faster RAM in and it will work, so it it uses DDR3, you can put in cheap 1600 sticks; at Newegg you can get 16GB (2x8) of Cruical for $115...
I'm on a i7 quad core hyper at 8Gb Ram. I can do 4 fully morphed haired clothed Genesis figures, all with Displacement Shaders on the clothing and the Snow Shader applied to almost all the Props in the scene with Uber based lighting at 1920x1080. That will almost push my PC to max use as far as Rendering goes. But the Fur shaders do eat LOTS of ram I'm sorry to say.
My new 8GBs of RAM is out for delivery. Hopefully I can get it in the machine and play around tonight. I'll report back as to how much better things are after doubling my RAM.
While I haven't loaded too much content into my system yet, I have managed to overheat my laptop during rendering a couple of times... automatic emergency shutdown, anyone? ;-)
I'd recommend something like http://www.rosewill.com/products/1797/ProductDetail_Overview.htm to prevent the overheating.
I thought for fun, I'd throw DAZ on my laptop at work so I could goof off on my lunch break. It's a new 2.8GHz Dell, 4GB RAM. Not like a total piece of junk. It crashes as soon as it starts to render, pretty much making it unusable. I uninstalled it right away.
I'd either say that the design of your laptop is bad(cheap?) or that you have hardware problems. May be check if the fans function correctly and monitor your temperature. Also I don't know how old your laptop is, but if it's old, may be some interior cleanup could be good. There could be some accumulated dust inside. The emergency shutdown may be accessible through bios or some manufacturers could eventually give access to it with an utility. But Default settings should be ok and changing it is at your risk
I had many notebooks and never faced emergency shutdown. And recent laptop should have less heat problem especially with recent processors and if using SSD which don't produce heating instead of classic Hard drive
I think it's more of the "cheap" type of problem, as it's a regular consumer goods laptop.
I've bought a PC now.
If it is not old, even with cheap laptop that shouldn't happen, and I would find that unacceptable.
Well, it's about 5 years old. I usually keep it in a sleeve so it doesn't attract too much dust, but a clean-up is perhaps in place.
Also, it holds up fine for about 6-8 minutes, so as long as I don't go into extra-high render settings, I'm usually fine.
I wanted to buy a new desktop PC anyway, it just happened a little earlier than initially planned. :-)
I have 16g of Ram on Win 7. I have been working on a enclosed garden scene similar to the one Howie Farkes did in his Japanese Garden. I finished it out with over 300 plant objects, some hi-rez and others not. I was curious as to just how much Daz would let me put in there before it crashed....but it never did. It did slow waaaay down when I would try and move the camera view. The final product took 4 hours to render. I tried doing this with Daz 4.0, but I was still on Win XP32 probably using about 3g of Ram. It didn't take long for Daz to crash back then.