GPU renders first frame only for iRay image series, then goes CPU-only
Snuggins
Posts: 52
I restart my Win10 64-bit machine with 970 GTX (4GB vram) , have latest Nvidia driver installed. I run the latest Daz release, load my simple scene (two G3 figures and not much else except skydome and a few primitives standing in for props) which has a 20 frame animation. It doesn't matter if I make the interactive view iRay or just plain OpenGL to start. I hit render. Looking at GPU-Z while it renders, the load on the GPU rises and it renders frame 1 fine, 64 iterations in 90 seconds. Then frame 2. GPU load drops. Only 11 iterations, using CPU only, in 90 seconds. The scene is obviously not any more complex, there is just a minor movement between frames. This has been happening for awhile now. Should this be happening?
Edit: Looking back at the frames now, it turns out the GPU kicked in again after 4 CPU renders. Out of 19 renders, 6 were CPU and 13 were GPU. Renders 1-4,6,8 were CPU. So maybe it is the GPU passing its heat threshold, not sure.
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Have you tried rendering as image series, or as avi?
It woukd help if you noted the version of D|S you are using. Quite a number of users have reported this issue with the latest public 4.9 release.
Hello,
I have the same problem but, much worse, it even destroyed my first GPU!
Yes i blame the software for it!.
My Hardware : WIN 10 64bit ;Samsung PM961 512GB M.2 SSD - 2800/1600 MB/s read/write for the rest look into the image, Rayzen 7, 1080TI ...etc.pp.
I make a list with my problems and the solution to it;
Problem 1;
sliders don't wanna start moving and it looks like DAZ3D freezes for the next 10 sec, i mean anyone,
Solution 1;
Cut your Network Connection by deactivating your network adapter and it will slide like an oiled engine.
No,"Work offline" won't do it neither ... nor help!
Problem 2;
Like "bd singer" wrote about the render situation and any other render and hardware based Problem such as;
render stops running on gpu or black screen ( those two are mostly connected) for a couple of sec or pc shut down or anything in the direction,
as long you not have Overclock your PC , the solution is simple;
Cut your Network Connection by deactivating your network adapter and it will all be good!
Now you can say, this is a network problem, but that affects exclusively on DAZ3D! No other program makes problems because of my network!
And i Stop my Windows Firewall to test it, including "Defender". doesn't help.
And another good question, why does DAZ3D connect at regular intervals, which freezes DAZ3D, although I activate "worke offline".?
And another fact is, pure Intel systems seem less strongly affected by it. I still have an Intel based HP laptop and since it has never occurred the freeze slider or cancel render.
But as a fact can be rated, no matter what system (Intel or AMD), without active network card, DAZ 3D is a much better.
And of course it's always the newest version of DAZ3D. just in case someone asks for it.
I can't remember all those numbers behind the 4.xxxx.
Cheers! Sojak
I'm not sure what the screenshots are proving.
DS won't kill your GPU, but if the GPU is marginal in soem way or if it's internal protections are defective then it may well be the stress of rendering that reveals the faults.
If you are not connected, and didn't opt into the product Improvement programme, then DS won't connect to the Internet. it will, however, use Internet protocol to connect to the local PostgreSQL database - that may be what you are seeing as connection attempts. It does, however, sound as if you may have networking issues that those local connections are tripping over, hence the freezing with the network hardware enabled.
The screenshots show what hardware i use, to avoid future questions about my hardware, that's all.
I don't say i know where it is coming from, i only say what kind of solution i have.
What not really is a final and permanent solution, but it helps.
And yes, it is actually a networkproblem. In the moment, when I have left the homegroup, the sliding controllers have started again without freezing DAZ 3D to work.
It still takes time until they react but at least not so long and more important, no freeze.
But that raises the next question, what do I have to do so to correlate a private network and DAZ 3D together?
I mean, we're talking about a private network, installs Windows more or less alone.
So it's being in the Homegroup that seems to trigger it? That's not a feature I have every used.
You need to download MSI afterburner. Video card manufactures set up fan profiles for gaming not the intense usage Iray puts your video card thru. You need to turn the fan to 100% I have the newer Nvidia 1070's and they are cooler than my Titan X Maxwell but I still have to turn on the fans on my 1070's to 100% on just doing Iray still's. I ran a short test on a 30sec Iray animation (took about 30mins) with my Titan X & with 100% fan and you would not believe how hot the video card got. I would not recommend doing animations without water cooling on a video card that has suffecent cooling on both the main GPU and Memory chips. With water cooling I am not talking about a simple small radiator with one 120mm fan! You will need at least a double radiator with two 120mm fans per card. It is no joke Iray will cook your Video card if you are not carefull. I'm suprised that Daz has not warned it's users about this fact. If you want to do stills 100% fan works great but animations stress the card so. My recommendation would be to render animations with 3delight or blender cycles cpu/gpu or if you must do Iray animations get into some serious water cooling.
Thanks Silver Dolphin, I have been booting with fans on max speed in bios, but will look into afterburner it rings a bell. The warning about frying my card is important and useful, I appreciate it.
Hello @bdsinger. I would recommend having a look at the log file [ Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File...] at seeing what message DAZ is throwing out when the GPU fails. More often than not, you see the dreaded " unspecified launch failure (while initializing memory buffer) " warning, sometimes accompanied by the core_renderer_wf.cpp:xxx failure warning in the log.
There are a few reasons why the GPU fails. In your case though, are you rendering to a [New Window] or [Direct To File]? For any Non-Still Image rendering process, always render directly to file. Daz has a bad habit of retaining data on the VRAM, which you can see if you fire up GPU-z, and this memory allocation is only flushed out when you close the program. When you render to a New Window, DAZ takes a bite from your available GPU memory, which might cause your textures to overload your VRAM memory cap (4gigs for GTX 970 even with the 3.5gigs+500mb debacle) and IRay rendering is then bumped off to your slower CPU cores. Rendering to file solves the problem on this front.
Another issue is a bad overclocking. If you havent stressed your OC and benched them without ANY artifacts or minor failure flags on your benchmark engine of choice, you are better off running your GTX on stock clocks rather than risk consecutive GPU failures or failures during complex, high duration renders.
If the previous two issues dont play a role in your case, then heat may be a factor. I can give you a snippet of my exprience, since I too have a single GTX 970 (EVGA FTW+) for IRay rendering, and during rendering my temps stay at 59C at 40~50% fan speed with 26~32C ambient temperature with a custom fan curve. I dont use EVGA Precision X since I found it to be very unreliable, instead I use MSI's afterburner. You might have to sit down and troubleshoot your case by setting up your test scene and checking if the memory is getting overloaded or if temperatures are spiking during consecutive rendererings.
Also, from personal observations, I havent seeing drastic gain in rendering with GPU+CPU rather than GPU alone. Yes rendering on both Might shave off around 30mins~1hour on a 15 hour still image render (if I can pull out my misplaced log file I can give you the exact comparison values for GPU vs GPU+CPU timings...) and the folks at pugetsystems advice to render on both for faster completion times. But for any non-synthetic scenario, rendering on CPU creates not only IMMENSE heat (I have an AIO a dual fan liquid cooler for my i7 skylake cores) which needs to be handled properly so that it doesnt stagnate inside/around your case and fry components in the long run but it also brings your system to a crawl unless you cordon off a few cores/let your computer quietly slave away.
There are other methods to try and fix the nvidia failures, but first try these simplers ones without having to resort to more complicated means. Hope this helps!
The memory should be freed when the render window is closed -- it is kept while the window is open so that you can tweak certain parameters without having to start the render from scratch.
I know this is old but I hate it when someone never reports back when they solve something. So sorry for dredging this up. Just in case someone else has the issue.
I have used MSI Afterburner ever since Silver Dolphin (not sure how to @ a username with a space in it) suggested it and have never had the problem since. I changed my GPU fan curve so it is flat at 40% from 0 to 30c, then it increases so that it is at 80% when temps hit 50c, 90% at 60c, and hits 100% at around 90c, a sort of inverted exponential looking hill. This actual shape doesn't matter I didn't experiment much. I just wanted a more aggressive curve than the default. My 970 survived and am on a 1080 now, it is doing fine. I don't animate more than about 10 frames per run though, just to be safe.
Could you maybe make a screenshot of your curve settings? I recentyl encounered the problem of black out screens and now even with just a Michael 8 and some hair in it (the othere scenes were quite large so it could be that was the reason, but with that rather simiple scene i got suspicious). It as well seems my system first uses CPU instead of my gtx 1060 and takes full adavantag of the gpu only whe I have only the gtx selected in the render settings. I hat the setting like that before but that ressulted in regular fails because of overflow once the scenes became bigger.
Now I downloaded the Afterburner and still have a lot of confusion about it. I did change the curve manually so it starts earlier and mmore but seeing some reference might helpe me understand.
Thanks, I was thinking I'm on a good row, bt seems I'm not, meh
@Linwelly, I'm sorry for not seeing your request until now!
I will enclose a screenshot but again it wasn't due to any careful testing where this shape is optimal or anything, I just basically wanted the GPU fan to run more often. It will be loud, but I usually have headphones on anyway.
Note that there's another cool feature: you can have Afterburner overlay GPU memory usage and other details into any GPU-accelerated window, which is great when you don't want to check the system tray all the time. I had disabled it due to some annoyances but in preparation to screenshot it I dug a little deeper and saw that one annoyance could be avoided. It obscured the Pose Tool since default is upper left of the window. But in the RivaTunerStatisticsServer system tray item (automatically launched by Afterburner if you enable anything it does) I saw that I could add an offset or pick other corners. I added 128 with the little horizontal arrows in RivaTSS and it now doesn't obscure the Pose Tool as seen in second screenshot. In the Afterburner Monitoring tab, you can choose what to include in the OSD and/or system tray. Here I display GPU temp, GPU percent usage, GPU fan percent speed, and VRAM usage for my 1080.
Afterburner is set to start with Windows (10) but it never does, maybe because it requires elevated privileges. So I am in the habit of launching Afterburner manually, every time I boot. There's probably an easy solution to that.
Sorry for the unnecessarily long response when all you wanted was the curve. A misguided attempt to make up for my week+ latency in responding. Sorry once again!
No need to be sorry @bdsinger those were all valuable information I like the idea of putting the info into the viewport, I'll have to try that.
Its true the afterburner doesn't start by itself on Win7 either, I usually start it when I open DS. I actually tried a similar cureve as well, starting with 40% but I guess i should increase further at the upper end.
Thanks a lot for sharing!