Viewport requirements
scyhoce
Posts: 69
in The Commons
I was wondering on what the viewport in daz3d depends on, hardware wise? What can I add to my PC to improve the lag in my viewport?
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By default the viewport runs on your display device. The basic texture shaded viewport is usually not too heavy, the Iray viewport is pretty much always going to lag a little or a lot depending on GPU.
You can dig into render settings advanced tab and find a section that allows you to change rendering devices if your PC has multiple devices to render with. Interactive mode refers to the Iray viewport.
The GPU does a lot of heavy lift here, but Daz Studio is highly single threaded on CPU, and that can cause problems. If you are building large complex scenes, that can drag things down even on very powerful hardware. Lots of mesh density, like a bunch of Genesis people at high subdivision, will be heavy. If this is your problem you can reduce subdivision until you need to render, and remember only the render subdivision counts for the actual render. The viewport subdivision, logically, only affects the viewport and can be turned down. Having a lot of high resolution textures can as well. I use a lot of 8K textures, and going to the surfaces tab can sometimes have a slight delay, even on my machine that has a 3090 and a 5800X. Also, if you use a lot of items that have Smoothing enabled, this hits the CPU pretty hard. Every time you do something, the CPU must recalculate all the items with smoothing over again. This can absolutely lead to serious lag.
So the first thing to do is look at your scene and find if anything has smoothing on. Select the item, and look at the parameters tab. You can have smoothing on, and then smoothing has 2 different settings. A smoothing iteration count and a collision count. Both of these impact CPU use. The higher the counts are, the longer it takes to calculate. You can disable smoothing until you are about ready to render.
Also, the more morphs you have for a Genesis generation, the longer it takes to load models for that Genesis. Like if you have 10,000 morphs for G8F, it will take a lot longer to load G8F.
There are other things that can slow down DS. Like having lots of products that have large size thumbnails. Even these can hog up some resources and cause DS to slow down when you browse your content library.
I can say I have seen the DS app perform better after building my 5800X system. My old i5-4690 was showing it age. I can have more stuff going on for sure. But that i5 was very old. Almost any decent CPU is going to be ok for now, because like I said earlier, a lot of stuff running in DS is single threaded. So getting a big monster CPU with tons of cores is totally a waste. Single core performance is the key, but you don't have to go wild with it. I also saw a nice bump over the years going from a 670 to 970 to 1080ti to 3090. With each of these upgrades I saw the viewport do a little better. But again, even with a 3090 the Iray viewport is not instant.
Without knowing your specs, I cannot say what your issue is. In general I still suggest focusing on GPU power above all else, and possibly even skimping on CPU if that means getting a tier stronger GPU. You only need a half decent CPU for DS.
Daz Studio has a number of bottlenecks tied to the software itself. Perhaps the mythical DS5 will fix these issues, as it might be more multithreaded. Just going multithreaded would be a huge performance boost for DS on almost every PC around.
I aimed for 'adequate' on the single thread side with my i5-13600. With other, multi-thread, programs it seems quite respectable as opposed to the 'a bit on the slow side' with DS.
I will say, DS is not slowed down by running all sorts of other stuff in the background now, which it was with my Win7 2core machine before getting this one.
Regards,
Richard
Thanks for the reply. I have an overclocked 3060 12gb, with i7 13700f, objects in my scenes basically have little textures, I use shaders mostly. But I have lots of high polygon objects. I think you're right about the single thread issue because I see nothing else that I could do about it hardware wise except getting a strong cpu with better single thread performance. (I'm not sure that will be worth it though). if I get 2x the price of my cpu I will probably get 35% increase in viewport boost, which is not good. I keep after effects and maybe few lesser programs running along with daz, when I close them it doesn't do much. Could Ram speed affect this maybe? I have 32gb of 3200 Mhz.
i5 13600 is really good in multithread performance, which is great for allowing other programs to run along with Daz. Though it doesn't help with running daz faster itself
"Just going multithreaded would be a huge performance" is so true. also think most of the modes are OpenGL based, aside from maybe Iray-something. the rest as outrider42 said. there is an OpenGL settings thing somewhere, not sure if the forum will let me upload pics today, internet been a bit iffy for a while here.
uh, nope, interwebs still broken, (hanging on uploading and just not going further) hmm.
Edit -> Preferences. in the Preferences window, interface tab.
Not that there is much to help speed things up there if your OpenGL graphics card is newer than something like a 6800GT era thing (AKA, OpenGL v 2.1 or newer than 2 decades old). Per pixel shading is eh, hardware AA may help, Display optimization to 'best' maybe, and ignore pixel buffer if it's 2k x 2k as most newer cards do much larger buffers internally. I think daz is using OpenGL v 2-dot-something, and GPUs today are past version 5 something.
with a GT730, I was seeing over a thousand FPS with that OpenGL interface in Hexagon, Daz Studio it depended on what was in the scene and what mode the view field was in. With a GTX1050 or GTX1070 I can't even read the FPS thing in hexagon it's so fast (blurry "# # # # FPS"), lol. wireframe modes are still iffy in daz studio tho, and preview modes forget it unless ye got a rack of VCAs or something from the future, lol. * I can not confirm that a VCA or DGX would function with daz studio, as they cost more than I make in an entire lifetime. Just a guess of how many graphics cards duct-taped together would bring 1 frame every tens of minutes down to 30 FPS would be a lot.
I've found the things that slow down my viewport aren't hardware related but what I have in the scene. I've found fibermesh and smoothing are the biggest culprits. For whatever reason, sometimes you just need to turn off smoothing altogether until ready to render. Even when interactive update update isn't on sometimes it'll act like it is. Gotta love the spaghetti code that is DS.
Agree about the hair - any fibre type will drag the viewport performance down significantly. Posing becomes a laggy affair.
Oh yes, fiber mesh stuff can make DS crawl, too.
A 13700 is perfectly fine. There really isn't much you can do from a hardware standpoint. Software is the bottleneck. You can try some of the display options Zarcon mentioned, but all of the lag is coming from what you have in your scene. Dense mesh can do it, even without textures, it depends on what sort of mesh it is.
You can always hide things in the scene tab until you are ready to render. Hide the denser mesh objects. Maybe even just hide hairs in general. Some Daz hairs are very heavy even if they are not mesh based. If you didn't know, you can hide everything parented to an object by holding down CRTL when hitting the button to hide it. This makes hiding and unhiding stuff a lot easier. So you can hide a character and all of their clothes and hair with just one click. Some 3rd party content can be very unoptimized and problematic in DS. If something is not rigged properly, that can cause some issues in a scene. This goes back to what I said above, it depends on what the mesh is. If this mesh was like quickly converted from some other software it may not be optimized for Daz.
If importing stuff into Daz, you can try reducing the poly counts before import and making it so the object can be subdivided in Daz at render time rather than the viewport. Daz also has a product called Decimate, though I have not used it in forever and forget how to use it. I don't even know if Decimator still works, if you are interested in it, you can search for some forum topics on it (in you favorite search engine, not the forum search.)
And again, smoothing can be performance killer. A lot of Daz products have smoothing enabled by default. It is worth looking to see if any items have it.
I'm in the middle of a long render right now but I thought that hiding (making hair invisible) didn't help with the posing lag. My memory is notoriously bad so I might be mis-remembering. Some vendors have included versions of the hair more viewport-friendly which does help a lot.I've also seen props, etc., that look like the artist has just exported from ZBrush with billions of polygons without a thought of retopology for DAZ Studio. Decimate does work and I think there's a way to do it in Blender too if vertex count is not an issue.
I don't enable interactive smoothing.and rarely use settings higher than 3 for either the smoothing or collision iterations.