Exceedingly Long Dealy Before Render
jaredwolf55
Posts: 11
Hello. I ran into an issue with rendering. Normally I'm able to render a scene just fine in Iray. Indoor, outdoor, no issues. However, in those circumstance I made the scene by scratch with simple props and geometries with a texture. However I'm now trying to render a scene using TangoAlpha's Country Ford set, and Iray seems to be taking a very long time to enter the verbose phase, seemingly stopping at 0% with this in the history
Rendering in NVIDIA Iray
Compiling Shaders - 0/1
Rendering image
Rendering...
I'm not sure what the issue is, as I can render the other parts of the picture fine, like characters and props I put in. But even if I just try to render the scene itself it just halts at that spot everytime and all attempts to cancel the render end in DAZ Studio crashing itself. I'm not sure what the issue is, if I just need to let it cook a while longer or something more severe. Any and all help is greatily appreciated.
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Comments
It would be very helpful in troubleshooting your issue to know a few details about your system.
My specs are.
DAZ 4.9
Windows 7
intel Core i5-3450 cpu @ 3.10GHz
8 gig
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 960 with 2 gigs RAM
You are probably defaulting to CPU rendering which will take (a lot) longer given very little system RAM and even less Vram.
You also haven't said what you consider a lomg delay. Some people think a couple of minutes is a long delay. Those used to complex scenes and cpu renders think a lomg delay is a few hours.
You've run out of memory in your GPU. That's how my CPU renders. Unforunately the computation precision is not the same between the CPU and GPU for the same real time used. It's still look good though if you have patience.
The delay before rendering actually commences is D|S and Iray building the scene database. This is done in the CPU, single-threaded, and your GPU is not involved. (That said, at 2GB your card very obviously doesn't have enough VRAM to support a scene like this, so it will not be used for the actual render.)
Looking at the set in the Daz store, I'd say it looks very computationally intensive. It may take several minutes for rendering to commence. Wait at least 10 minutes for there to be the first Iteration loop. Then you can decide if there's something more seriously wrong.
The set says it supports both 3Delight and Iray. If it comes with separate Iray shaders, be sure to use those. Applying the shaders ahead of time will reduce the scene database overhead.
The system "hang" following the cancel is typical in this scenario.
Your system lacks RAM for anything but basic renders, and this is likely causing D|S to swap memory in and out, using your hard drive as virtual RAM. This can cause severe slowdown. RAM is fairly inexpensive these days. I'd at least double it to 16 GB. It would be the cheapest meaningful upgrade you can make to your computer, and all your applications will benefit.
As others have said, not enough CPU muscle, GPU muscle or RAM muscle.
Even a decent to good spec Gaming machine is woefully under-powered for rendering.
I feared that my rig wasn't poweful enough, I got it mainly for gaming, sometime before I got into DAZ Studio art.
Normally its instantaneous before getting to the iterations, maybe a minute at best, however I let it do its thing for upwards to half an hour, still nothing.
3Ddelight seems to work with the scene just fine.
So, I need more RAM, time to go shopping. Is it at all possible to add RAM to the GPU, or am I only able to add it to the motherboard?
No, it is what it is.
Just remember that more VRAM on the GPU won't speed up the scene collection process, only the actual render. Since you're not getting to that point in this case, you won't see any difference. As I mentioned, the creation of the scene database is done using just the CPU, and a single thread at that.
It very much sounds like D|S and the loaded scene is consuming much of the 8 GB in your machine. Any setup and rendering will have to use swapped memory from the hard drive. This can take a month of Sundays when RAM is tight. I suppose you could try setting a larger paging file size. Likely, though, the real solution is in adding RAM.
Depending on the motherboard and type of RAM, the cost should be affordable. You might also consider used (but cerified) RAM.
One thing I forgot to mention is that, during this process, the computer doesn't slow down at all, almost like the database creation is stalled or so. 3Ddelight, however, rendered to complete image no problem, fairly quickly I might add at around 14 minutes tops. But I think getting more RAM chips for my motherboard will be a more longterm solution.
On a scene like this, D|S may already be using the lion's share of your PC's 8GB (check with the Windows task manager). This is just to keep the scene in memory, but this memory is not what Iray uses. When rendering first commences, the scene needs to be replicated in a format Iray can use, and this can take several more gigabytes.
Since you don't have enough physical RAM, your PC must swap out segments of memory to the hard drive. The disk activity is single-threaded, so the render won't begin until Iray gets its full scene to process. The basic task manager doesn't show disk data transfer, but you can see if it's occuring by watching the LED for the drive. If it keeps flashing you know this is what's going on. (If it's not flashing, then indeed the render has probably stalled out.)
Well after some testing I can comfirm that it is a lack of memory that's the issue, not a doubt left. I loaded up the scene again and turned off a few RAM using programs, Steam and Firefox, and it was able to get started in under a minute using only the active viewport for reslution. But on the image I was working on, at a 16/9 2200 res it returned to its stalling nature, however I did see a blinking LED, and it may be the one you specified, hopeing its the right one. So it is working, if just slowly.
Thanks for all the help! It is high time that I get more ram chips for my rig.
The only time I experience slow render is when I get multiple instances of PostgreSQL Server (postgres.exe) hogging all my CPU and RAM. I seriously thought sometimes was wrong with my system when the GPU was not rendering a simple scene. I checked my task manager and saw more than 10 of those PostgreSQL Server. I was forced to restart my PC just to refresh the system. Is this a known issue?
One more question, and I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but what chip would you recomend? Right now I have two Kingston Hyperx 4G dual channel, yet I can't find any of the non Fury Hyperx models. So, would it be best on my end to just replace those two with two 8gig chips for the long run, or am I able to add two new Kingston 8G chips alongside them?
My opinion: If adding RAM it should be the exact same kind. I don't even like mixing brands. If you're replacing RAM, you can use whatever is appropriate for your machine. The latest RAM upgrade I did was with used (but tested) RAM. It was very inexpensive -- 16GB for $20, including shipping.
Well, 'exceeding long' is relative to personal expectations but the longest part is preparing the scene for rendering and if you don't have enough GPU RAM it'll take even longer because it will fall out to the CPU.
@jaredwolf55
As others say it may be not enought vram and iray reversing to cpu. But to verify what's the issue you should look at the log (help > troubleshooting > log). I didn't see any log information posted here. Also as a general rule keep your drivers up to date. And the links below may definitely help in your case.
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit
Ah I use Scene Optimizer, though for the scene I was going for it still wasn't enough, but thank you for the recomendation. I'll be getting more RAM in the coming days hopefully.
I wish to thank all of you for your help and patience!
Also, I don't have the Country Ford but I had a look at its page. It says it does an extensive use of instancing. So setting the instancing optimization on memory in the iray rendering panel may definitely help in this case. Also disabling optix saves some vram with a minimal impact on speed. Finally setting the render target to file instead of new window can minimize the frame buffer size.
EDIT: also wiring the monitor to the modo should leave the geforce alone. So that the viewport gets the vram from the intel hd, getting you the full 2 Gb free for rendering. This way you can't use iray for the viewport though.
https://www.daz3d.com/country-ford-for-daz-studio-and-carrara
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/157401/iray-failed-to-allocate-device-frame-buffer
It is known by me, quite often ;-).