Daz Studio Pro BETA - version 4.20.0.17! (*UPDATED*)

Richard Haseltine

VEGA said:

Don't even bother updating, the new Iray is broken and bad. Even the gpu usage is worse than it was in ver 2020. I'm surprised none looked at the gpu-z during rendering, especialy at power draw and memory controller load. It's not a smooth curve by any means. Power draw is going up and down and mem controller load is going from 60 to 10% contantly, where in the old 2020 version it's fine. Also iray statistics disapeard from the rendering window. As I said don't even bother.

are you reprting these issues? Some of them may well be bugs, but if no one finds and reports them they will remain.

VEGA

Richard Haseltine said:

VEGA said:

Don't even bother updating, the new Iray is broken and bad. Even the gpu usage is worse than it was in ver 2020. I'm surprised none looked at the gpu-z during rendering, especialy at power draw and memory controller load. It's not a smooth curve by any means. Power draw is going up and down and mem controller load is going from 60 to 10% contantly, where in the old 2020 version it's fine. Also iray statistics disapeard from the rendering window. As I said don't even bother.

are you reprting these issues? Some of them may well be bugs, but if no one finds and reports them they will remain.

 I've already reported them. Is it gonna get fixed? IDK. Someone with the 3000 Nvidia cards could check if it does the same for them with the "power draw/core usage" and "memory controller load" going up and down when rendering vs the old iray in the same scene.

P302

I can't provide the metrics you mention. Where can I read that out? I don't have a working GPU-Z at present. But I can get some data from the Firestorm tool.

  The card is a RTX3090, NVIDIA Driver is 472.12, Studio is 4.16.1.6.

The GPU und MEM utilisation graphs look suspicious. As far as I remember they used to be more flat with older drivers. 

Render-Times however are roughly the same except for mixing different light types as I mentioned in a post before.

 

IceCrMn

OK, so here's a short test run I did with GPUz.

RTX 3060 12GB

It's logged several Power draw points of data.

Not sure which one you are interested in.

I'm not finding a "core usage" data point.

So I'll have to look into what's going on with that.

Questions;

What should I be looking for to determine what a "good curve" is?

Wouldn't power draw and core usage vary through out the render process as cores complete jobs and thus core usage and power draw adjust on the fly between being used, queued and waiting for data from another core, and done waiting for a job so not using a core or power at all? 

Which cores? The RTX, tensor, or cuda?

Can GPUz log data points from each type separately so we can get useful data points?

I'm not finding the option to turn on sensor logging for that.

also, a few notes

Daz can't fix anything in the iray render engine.Nvidia owns it so problem reports would need to end up over at Nvidia to see any use.

Daz may be able to forward them if we find something though.

lastly, this is the first time I've tried making graphs from csv log output so not sure I got what you were looking for my first try.

The forum won't let upload ODF or csv files, so just rename the log.txt to log.csv and you can open it in a office spreadsheet and have a look at what GPUz gave me for data points.

VEGA

You don't need to log it, it should be fairly visible difference. I've up uploaded gpuz screenshot from Iray 2020, latest Nvidia driver. The "Memory Controller Load" is fairly flat, same as total power draw. New Iray should be plotted more like a saw blade. The "GPU Chip Power Draw" is constant 115 - 120W for me, the new Iray it looks like the chip is dying, diping bellow 100W and then back up to 115W.

IceCrMn

That graph is to small for me to make out the changes, can you upload the log.txt so I can open it in libreoffice to see it?

All of those lines look like a small bit of red tape with a rough edge on one side.

IceCrMn

I didn't know what "Memory Controller Load" was measuring so looked it up.

Found this

"...It's similar to CPU utilization, it measures how much of your total memory bandwidth is being used. So if you increase memory speed and don't touch the core clock, you have more bandwidth and the IMC doesn't have to do as much relative to that maximum amount of "work" it can do. The opposite happens if you decrease memory speeds because there is less bandwidth to be had. I would imagine that higher load might impact latency, but maybe not until you actually get *really* close to 100% like 85-90% or higher..."

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/what-is-memory-controller-load-measuring.200137/

Sounds like this is something you would want to remain low.

johndoe_36eb90b0

IceCrMn said:

What if I'm using my primitves to make walls, floors, sidewwalks, earrings, and other things like that.

I use them lot's of things other than simple light planes.

And I can just move the light planes out of view of the  camera.  

What then? I don't see how what I suggested would affect you in any way then?

johndoe_36eb90b0

P302 said:

This is because the ghostlight mesh casts a shadow if opacity is set to a high value because it's still there, only the direct rays to the camera are suppressed. I only did play with the - admittlingly - weak workaround and lowering the opacity while increasing the emission.

For the type of renders I do much worse is that if you mix emissive lights with spot lights for instance, the renders now take forever to get a resonable quality. So yeah, better waiting for a proper fix.

Your proposals (dedicated type of light) sound good, but does DAZ have enough weight to get a company like NVIDIA to fix this? Do they get custom features?

How can a flat horizontal plane cast a shadow on itself?

Direct rays don't seem to be suppressed because the plane renders as black. Unless by "suppressed" you mean "by turning the surface into an ideal black body that absorbs all light". That's totally not what anyone here asking for ghost light workaround wanted.

I usually avoid mixing lights except for HDRI and emissive.

As for whether NVIDIA would do a $custom for DAZ I think it's only fair, they broke the whole ecosystem here with that single formula change.

IceCrMn

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

IceCrMn said:

What if I'm using my primitves to make walls, floors, sidewwalks, earrings, and other things like that.

I use them lot's of things other than simple light planes.

And I can just move the light planes out of view of the  camera.  

What then? I don't see how what I suggested would affect you in any way then?

You're right, I should have been a bit more clear.

I agree with #2, which would negate #1.

#1 isn't much of a difference from what we got with the current workaround.

Studio isn't the only software that uses Nvidia's Iray engine.

If other users of other software were using something similar to ghost lights, I'm sure Nvidia will listen and make changes.

If it's just us Daz Studio users we may not get what we want.

Other than version freezing iray and not upgrading past the version in the general release that still works with ghost lights, I really don't know what options Daz has to deal with the situation.

And yes it does effect things other than just the ghost lights.

johndoe_36eb90b0

IceCrMn said:

adding emission to a primitive has always produced dirty noisy lighting that took ages to render out the fireflies.

They where just fast, easy, and a bit of a novelty to work with.I think that's why everyone liked them so much, even if they weren't all that great in quality.

I used them for preview rendering when I knew I wasn't going to save the render or even the scene and was basically just "playing with my toys"

First, that isn't my experience at all.

Second, no -- they were not just "fast, easy, and a bit of novelty", much less lower quality.

Light from an emissive surface is the only way to use IES profiles -- you can't really simulate different light distributions without those, and you can only achieve so much with spotlights when it comes to scene aesthetics.

You should give them a try sometimes, with right IES profile you can get any kind of light you want (narrow or diffuse, hard or soft shadows, etc).

johndoe_36eb90b0

IceCrMn said:

#1 isn't much of a difference from what we got with the current workaround.

I disagree, current workaround doesn't work like what I suggested under #1 at all -- please see the screenshots in my post few posts back. Not only it renders black but it casts shadow, and it has strong reflections.

What I suggested would fully restore old way of calculating luminance (i.e. stop multiplying it with opacity).

IceCrMn

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

IceCrMn said:

adding emission to a primitive has always produced dirty noisy lighting that took ages to render out the fireflies.

They where just fast, easy, and a bit of a novelty to work with.I think that's why everyone liked them so much, even if they weren't all that great in quality.

I used them for preview rendering when I knew I wasn't going to save the render or even the scene and was basically just "playing with my toys"

First, that isn't my experience at all.

Second, no -- they were not just "fast, easy, and a bit of novelty", much less lower quality.

Light from an emissive surface is the only way to use IES profiles -- you can't really simulate different light distributions without those, and you can only achieve so much with spotlights when it comes to scene aesthetics.

You should give them a try sometimes, with right IES profile you can get any kind of light you want (narrow or diffuse, hard or soft shadows, etc).

I take it you haven't seen some of my posts about using IES profiles then? 

Yes, they are very useful.

johndoe_36eb90b0

VEGA said:

 I've already reported them. Is it gonna get fixed? IDK. Someone with the 3000 Nvidia cards could check if it does the same for them with the "power draw/core usage" and "memory controller load" going up and down when rendering vs the old iray in the same scene.

I don't get what you are complaining about? That Iray renders at the same speed as before, just using less power?

Why do you expect power draw to be constant if Iray changelog says that resource use was optimized?

Why is that bad, and in what way exactly it is affecting you?

johndoe_36eb90b0

IceCrMn said:

I take it you haven't seen some of my posts about using IES profiles then? 

Yes, they are very useful.

I must admit I haven't, and from the post I replied to I was under impression that you think emissive lights (and ghost lights by extension) are just a gimmick.

IceCrMn

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

IceCrMn said:

I take it you haven't seen some of my posts about using IES profiles then? 

Yes, they are very useful.

I must admit I haven't, and from the post I replied to I was under impression that you think emissive lights (and ghost lights by extension) are just a gimmick.

in earlier versions of the iray engine , and before we had things like RTX and tensor cores, fireflies were a big problem.

More recent versions of both the GPU cards and iray have come a long way in cleaning them up.

btw, ghost lights were discovered quite by accident. They weren't an intentional feature.

A user, I forget who.Discoverd that emissive light surfaces could have the opacity set to very low values( like 0.00001) and still emit light.Thus the ghost light was born. 

IceCrMn

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

VEGA said:

 I've already reported them. Is it gonna get fixed? IDK. Someone with the 3000 Nvidia cards could check if it does the same for them with the "power draw/core usage" and "memory controller load" going up and down when rendering vs the old iray in the same scene.

I don't get what you are complaining about? That Iray renders at the same speed as before, just using less power?

Why do you expect power draw to be constant if Iray changelog says that resource use was optimized?

Why is that bad, and in what way exactly it is affecting you?

I agree here.

After putting a little time into looking at what the measurements actually measure.

I see lower and cyclic power draw as a good thing, the net result will be lower power consumption.

The memory controller load measurement being very similar to "CPU utilization",  Isn't a very useful metric other than , "is my GPU card's memory controller saturated and causing high latency"

I didn't find the "Core usage" data in the log, but if it doesn't log per core type, it isn't very useful either.

IceCrMn

ohh, at least I learned how to convert csv log files into semi useful graph charts today though :)

Love learning new things.

Padone

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

all the candle flame, fire, effects, lightbulbs, windows and other light or even clothing or weapon props using emissive surfaces and opacity will still be broken

That sounds scary .. At this point to me the only solution seems to be for DAZ to don't upgrade to the new iray. I mean that's a DAZ decision, it is not mandatory to upgrade. If the new iray is not compatible with the DAZ assets for some reason then just skip it.

j cade

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

IceCrMn said:

adding emission to a primitive has always produced dirty noisy lighting that took ages to render out the fireflies.

They where just fast, easy, and a bit of a novelty to work with.I think that's why everyone liked them so much, even if they weren't all that great in quality.

I used them for preview rendering when I knew I wasn't going to save the render or even the scene and was basically just "playing with my toys"

First, that isn't my experience at all.

Second, no -- they were not just "fast, easy, and a bit of novelty", much less lower quality.

Light from an emissive surface is the only way to use IES profiles -- you can't really simulate different light distributions without those, and you can only achieve so much with spotlights when it comes to scene aesthetics.

You should give them a try sometimes, with right IES profile you can get any kind of light you want (narrow or diffuse, hard or soft shadows, etc).

Light from an emissive surface is not, in fact, the only way to use ies profiles, you can use ies profiles with point lights

johndoe_36eb90b0

j cade said:

Light from an emissive surface is not, in fact, the only way to use ies profiles, you can use ies profiles with point lights

You are correct, perhaps I should have been more specific.

You can use IES profiles with point lights, but you are limited to predefined geometry (point, rectangle, disc, sphere, cylinder instead of an arbitrary mesh), and you can only change the color temperature, not the actual color of the emission.

j cade

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

j cade said:

Light from an emissive surface is not, in fact, the only way to use ies profiles, you can use ies profiles with point lights

You are correct, perhaps I should have been more specific.

You can use IES profiles with point lights, but you are limited to predefined geometry (point, rectangle, disc, sphere, cylinder instead of an arbitrary mesh), and you can only change the color temperature, not the actual color of the emission.

... You can change the color of the emission. I think you should consider experimenting with point lights more, especially if you're going to so confidently state things they "can't" do

takezo_3001

RayDAnt said:

ragamuffin57 said:

Has anyone else encountered the new beta seems to use 100% of the GPU all the time when rendering and while idle?

I always  have both CPU and GPU activated to render and the previous beta  hardly touched my GPU and mainly rendered on CPU with occasional GPU usage as could not seem to get the GPU to render I now have gone full 180 to the GPU going overboard whenever I open daz

So seems strange that as soon as I open Daz my GPU sounds like a train and uses all my GPU memory

Has anyone else experienced this

Iray always uses 100% of a GPU's computational resources (vram usage will vary scene-to-scene) whenever a GPU is successfully being used to contribute to a render. Asuming you are an Iray liveview user, this sounds like totally normal behavior. Your computer's behavior prior to updating is what definitely sounds like it was borked.

It is NOT normal when it is idle... and yeah, I'm gonna check on my end as well, plus the orbiting speed in the viewport is like molasses, as that old bug is back again...

 

robograaf2

I upgraded a few days ago and DAZ has been using mountains of RAM since. Say 40-50 GB in simple scenes. Iray viewport mode often just shows the yellow progress bar in the right bottom infinitely. Any clue what's going on or is there any way to revert to 1.15? When closing down Daz Studio it doesn't actually close down either, I have to kill it through task manager to get it to quit.

IceCrMn

takezo_3001 said:

RayDAnt said:

ragamuffin57 said:

Has anyone else encountered the new beta seems to use 100% of the GPU all the time when rendering and while idle?

I always  have both CPU and GPU activated to render and the previous beta  hardly touched my GPU and mainly rendered on CPU with occasional GPU usage as could not seem to get the GPU to render I now have gone full 180 to the GPU going overboard whenever I open daz

So seems strange that as soon as I open Daz my GPU sounds like a train and uses all my GPU memory

Has anyone else experienced this

Iray always uses 100% of a GPU's computational resources (vram usage will vary scene-to-scene) whenever a GPU is successfully being used to contribute to a render. Asuming you are an Iray liveview user, this sounds like totally normal behavior. Your computer's behavior prior to updating is what definitely sounds like it was borked.

It is NOT normal when it is idle... and yeah, I'm gonna check on my end as well, plus the orbiting speed in the viewport is like molasses, as that old bug is back again...

 

I'm not seeing anything like this on my end.

RTX 3060

Driver version 497.09

The tool is CPUID HWMonitor.

Simply records lowest highest and current for several sensors

johndoe_36eb90b0

j cade said:

... You can change the color of the emission. I think you should consider experimenting with point lights more, especially if you're going to so confidently state things they "can't" do

My bad, you can change it. Color option is just not in the same place (next to IES profile) like with emissive surface.

However, the point about limited geometry still stands, and I personally find point lights annoying in the scene because their visual representation is adding to the clutter -- I much prefer invisible emissive lights.

johndoe_36eb90b0

robograaf2 said:

I upgraded a few days ago and DAZ has been using mountains of RAM since. Say 40-50 GB in simple scenes. Iray viewport mode often just shows the yellow progress bar in the right bottom infinitely. Any clue what's going on or is there any way to revert to 1.15? When closing down Daz Studio it doesn't actually close down either, I have to kill it through task manager to get it to quit.

Upgraded to what? Current release or this public beta? I have both installed and I don't have any problems with RAM usage or any yellow progress bars. What hardware are you using and did you update your video drivers before updating to latest DAZ Studio? Did you even read what has changed before upgrading?

You can revert to the previous version if you saved installer files (.zip and .dsx from Install Manager downloads directory). If you haven't, try opening a ticket and asking DAZ to provide you download links.

Finally, when closing DAZ Studio it deletes the scene and frees memory before exiting, that's why it is taking so long. It is known behavior for a long time and in the view of many it is pointless.

IceCrMn

If you leave the iray preview renderer running in the veiwport when you close Studio it will be turned on when you next start Studio. Maybe Daz should include a check for that during shutdown and switch it to textured view so it wont happen.

Saxa -- SD

IceCrMn said:

If you leave the iray preview renderer running in the veiwport when you close Studio it will be turned on when you next start Studio. Maybe Daz should include a check for that during shutdown and switch it to textured view so it wont happen.

Edit. Spoke too soon. The way was doing, thought it was in save duf. Just tested. It's in last used viewport before DS close as you wrote (still use batch file to quick close after each scene). Generally have viewport state set the way i want before i close.  Just a habit. Works for me regardless fyi.

IceCrMn

Saxa -- SD said:

IceCrMn said:

If you leave the iray preview renderer running in the veiwport when you close Studio it will be turned on when you next start Studio. Maybe Daz should include a check for that during shutdown and switch it to textured view so it wont happen.

Edit. Spoke too soon. The way was doing, thought it was in save duf. Just tested. It's in last used viewport before DS close as you wrote (still use batch file to quick close after each scene). Generally have viewport state set the way i want before i close.  Just a habit. Works for me regardless fyi.

I always turn it to textured before I shutdown Studio.

What I was getting at is, 

Several people are reporting that their GPU fans spin up and DS consumes a lot of the VRAM during DS startup.

One of the things that can cause that is leaving the iray preview renderer running in the veiwport when shutting down, because it will start back up as soon as DS starts.

Having Studio check that during shutdown, and switch it to textured view would stop that from happening.

 

also, while I'm talking about DS shutting down.

When users notice for the first time that DS remains running in the background for a little while after the main window has closed they think something sketchy is happening or DS is hung and still open.

Lots of posts about that over the years here.

Daz could have a popup window open when the shutdown starts and log to the window what DS is doing.

That popup could remain open after the main window has closed and be the last thing closed.

 

I know, sounds completely unnecessary . But it would save tech help requests and forum posts.Could also save a user from corrupting a scene file they've worked on for hours, weeks, months

I'm not a programmer, so I don't know if a more efficient method of shutting down DS can happen or not.

I'm just posting ideas.