Can you clear video card memory?

bueller1998_df4ca4b697

I have a Two very good cards in my system, and have some very reasonable render times. But after four or five renders, often the render times can quadruple or more. I'm immediatley saving or discarding every image I render so that doesn't build on the card. But I am finding I have to save my scene, exit out of Daz Studio, and maybe even reboot every four or five renders. (render times on a two character simple scene with old backdrops can increase from 6-7 minutes minutes to over an hour. Or 15 minutes to 2 hours or more.)

Having discovered this has reduced my render time considerably (yay!) but it doesn't seem like things should be working this way. Could there be something I am doing wrong?

If there is an easier way to clear video cache without exiting and reloading, and even rebooting, that would be great.

Toonces

You can disable OptiX in Render Settings > Advanced to see if that fixes your problem.

There's also a a purge script: Content Library > My Daz 3d Library > Scripts > Utilities > Purge Memory.

samurle

How much system RAM memory do you have installed?  16GB?  32GB?  More the better.

You can't clear video memory directly, maybe indirectly through clearing system memory.  But, whatever problem you're having, it must be related to system memory.  You can click Ctrl+Alt+Del to open up the Windows Task Manager to see how much system memory DazStudio.exe is consuming.

btw, the Purge Memory script clears Undo memory.

Richard Haseltine

Are you closing the render windows or leaving them open? Each open window will continue to hold GPU memory so that ti can resume the render.

Minam

Hey all, will restarting my graphics card clear the GPU memory cache or cuda memory?


My situation is after a shutdown, the computer starts randomly shutting down. After taking it to a shop where he reset the bios, the computer was fine, but after a crash from Daz3d I was back to the same problem as before. 

 

kenshaw011267

Your VRAM is volatile. It is cleared every ti me your PC shuts down or reboots. Therefore it is not the problem and clearing the VRAM is a waste of time. More than likely the shop didn't solve the problem in the first place. Resetting the bios is a thing but it isn't something that would have fixed the problem you're reporting. Installing a new version of the bios maybe but a program crash would not have caused that fix to fail. 

Do you get any kind of error message before the shutdown or does the system just go to a black screen with no warning?

nicstt

Why did he reset the bios?

What problem did he find that made him do that?

Has that reset caused a reversion to an earlier bios version? (Cant see it happening, but... It's good to confirm these things.)

There's a good chance that Studio crashing is a symptom of the problem, not the problem.

Minam

@kenshaw011267 black screen no warning. I checked the the logs, and every hardware fail happened when I was rendering in daz3d and the system crashed. After, a kernal error happend whereas the computer keeps restarting itslef. I've run the tests on temp, and the card is not overheating. In fact I ran stress tests before taking it to the shop, and it past and so did he. He then reset all the bios and the computer was runing like it was before the random shutdowns. It seems the problem is happneing again where after a shutdown from trying to render a scene, the computer can't hand the load it once could. For example before the first big crash, I could run xcom2 and many cam and now the system cant handle that. Back to daz3d, the renders can be longer than 6 minutes. At this rate, if this is happening like before, random system shutdowns will start happening. The restarts could be a clue... after the computer shuts down and restarts... its like its thinking again, some times it goes on for a while other times it just shuts off. The pattern is one hardware crash, then a series of restarrs and shutdowns later things are normal accept the machine looses a little bit of its ability to handle its previous loads.

Minam

@nicstt not a random dude, i went to a guy who builds computers for pro-gammers. His reputation is solid... having said that... he ran all the hardware tests he could, after 3 rounds of tests he determined the problem was software and thus reset everything. The computer came back and better than before... i uped the ram to 32... I didn't do any renders, just worked... part of my job uses the computer. The first time I started rendering again was a dream it was fast, ridiculously fast. Under 10 minutes for hi rez hd characters. For the first time, waiting for a render actually would save me time instead of doing post production... but... now im on a sad trjectory here. i have my older computer if I need to use that work but you know, new computer would be better. I want to fix this so I can render after work without worriny that i may render myself out of a job bc random crashes when working with clents during video chat does not look good.

Minam

Taking from this thread here are 2 screen shots showing the problem:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/261076/computer-keeps-restarting-itself-when-i-m-rendering-the-environments

 

Minam

Oh and thanks for any input. 

 

kenshaw011267

That sounds like an overclocking stability issue. Is your CPU overclocked? If not it may still be an overheating issue. Have you checked that all your fans are working? The next most likely issue is your system RAM. A bad stick of memory could be the problem.  To test your memory open the start menu and type Windows Memory Diagnostic and run the program that comes up. It will force a reboot of your PC and take a few minutes.

BTW your own diagnostic says it's a hardware not a software issue. Those things aren't perfect but resetting the bios would only really be relevant if you had been overclocking. 

charles

I'm aware this is an old post but kept coming up at the top of my searches so I thought I would respond for anyone else looking.

On windows 10 open your task manager and under the performance tab check what your GPU memory usage is. When you quit Daz studio to reopen a new scene, before launching daz for that new scene change the task manager tab to process and see if daz is still running as a process. Either wait for it to finish or end task to kill it. Then recheck yor Performance tab and GPU memory, you should see it resolve and then relaunch Daz.

If you are serious about rendering I would advize having 2 video cards in your machine. One with the largest RAM as your dedicated render card and then some cheap thing to handle your displays and normal graphics. Even though onboard is great it steals from your systems processing RAM butcan still be ok if your like building a box for ONLY rendering, like I have one with 3 2080s with the one monitor attached to the onboard.

DO NOT!!! I REPEAT, DO NOT set both a cheap video card and your good video card for processing in in the NVDIA Iray advanced tab. It will default to a max memory usage as the lowest card and it will hurt your rendering not improve it.

Richard Haseltine

charles said:

I'm aware this is an old post but kept coming up at the top of my searches so I thought I would respond for anyone else looking.

On windows 10 open your task manager and under the performance tab check what your GPU memory usage is. When you quit Daz studio to reopen a new scene, before launching daz for that new scene change the task manager tab to process and see if daz is still running as a process. Either wait for it to finish or end task to kill it. Then recheck yor Performance tab and GPU memory, you should see it resolve and then relaunch Daz.

If you are serious about rendering I would advize having 2 video cards in your machine. One with the largest RAM as your dedicated render card and then some cheap thing to handle your displays and normal graphics. Even though onboard is great it steals from your systems processing RAM butcan still be ok if your like building a box for ONLY rendering, like I have one with 3 2080s with the one monitor attached to the onboard.

DO NOT!!! I REPEAT, DO NOT set both a cheap video card and your good video card for processing in in the NVDIA Iray advanced tab. It will default to a max memory usage as the lowest card and it will hurt your rendering not improve it.

The last paragraph is certainly not correct - Iray uses the cards independently, if there are two or more cards with different memory sizes then smaller card(s) can be dropped from the render without affecting the use of the larger card(s).

kenshaw011267

I have an 11Gb and 8Gb card I exceed the 8gb card regularly. It only driops to CPU one fairly rare occasions and looking things over it is clearly I even exceeded 11.

Also there is literally no benefit to using a lower VRAM card or iGPU for display over a GPU used for rendering. Every consumer GPU, this excludes Quadros and Titans, always has a video buffer reserved by Windows. Whether a monitor is plugged in or not.