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No, 3DL can’t render from GPU. However there are multiple ways to speed up renders, depending on what you have in your scene.
Well atm I have 2 Gen 3's in a boxing ring and 2 lights. For some reason the render is sticking terribly with their hair. I'm over 2 1/2 hrs at 15% of the scene! Gah!!
Still rendering?
So what kind of lights would that be? And what kind of shaders are used for the problematic hairs? Are you using some form of global illumination like UberEnvironment 2 or AoA ambient lights?
When I have problems with Photorealistic Iray I switch to "Interactive" ;)
If you don't have whiz-bang multiple GPU's (separate graphics processors on special -- read expensive -- "Nvidia" video cards) rendering can be slow. Also, render at the smallest possible size that you can live with; I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination but it seems to me that a rendered image that's 2048 x 2048 pixels say, takes much more time to start looking really good -- more than "twice" the time even -- than the same thing rendered 1,024 x 1,024 pixels.
Sometimes I save the entire scene to disk and I'll name it something like "master scene". Then I'll delete one of the two figures and I'll save the scene again as "scene1b - left side figure only". Next, I'll reload the master file and I'll delete the OTHER figure and I'll save this new, modified scene with a name like "scene1c - RIGHT side figure ONLY". I might be wrong, but I believe that rendering the two modified scenes and then COMBINING them in an image editor allows me to get from Point "A" to Point "B" in my project faster especially if there are problems (which are sometimes inevitable) with the way things are positioned, problems that seem to demand another render or a full makeover or (shudder) a redo from start.
A variation on this would also be to make a small "check" render of say, 1024 or 1400 pixels across or something like that, just to see if the faces and shadows really look like they are going to turn out the way you want them - before committing to a "big render" I mean.
Right now I have an old computer for working and another old computer for rendering, or sometimes I'll render parts of a scene separately (2 computers rendering parts of the same scene at the same time) and I'll stop one render sooner than the other because it appears to have reached the point where further detail isn't worth the extra time require. The trick is to be able to use an image editor for some "post-render" work.
Similarly, if you have an image editor that supports transparent layers you could save three or four modified scenes of the gym as I described above: one master scene with everything, one with only the two figures, and one where the figures are blanked out or deleted eg. just the "background" elements - possibly tricky with ropes and things but anyway.
Hopefully you can understand this next part: load the scene with only the background elements, and consider that, since the two figures are the most important elements in the scene, you may be able to get by with not having to make the background super-duper; in fact things in the distance could even be blurred with a Gaussian Blur effect so why render that part for 24 or 36 hours or whatever?
Ok, save your quick rendering of just the background elements in a lossless format such as "quickie-background.bmp"
Now load the master scene again and delete everything but the figures - so the two figures will be sort of dangling in space, in DAZ Studio. Render to the same size as your "quickie" background, but this time increase the render quality and give it as much time as you can bear to wait. Save the render as "figures-layer-1st-try.TIF"
If you have an image editor that supports layers, you'll be able to load the quickie background bitmap file and then, separately, the TIFF file with just the two figures. Lasso the figures, hit Copy, and going back to the quickie background, Paste the figures in. Bingo, the only partly rendered background now has the higher quality figures layered over it... and if you included "Draw Ground" when you rendered the "figures" layer then you can have a HQ, smoke-like shadows included as well. This process also allows you to adjust the position of the figures a bit if you so desire, and playing around with how things are positioned may lead you to new scenic ideas that may not have been evident when you first started.
You can take the "delete unnecessary things" while rendering "only the most important elements" in high quality concept a bit further by saving the CAMERA settings for your scene separately. Then rotate the camera to go BEHIND the figures. From here the Geometry Editor allows you to delete any polygons that are not facing the camera -- and are not casting important shadows; this is a tricky point -- in effect saving a bit of time because the deleted polygons won't need to be computed or included by the rendering engine. What I'm saying is you can delete parts of the figures that the camera can't see, polygons that aren't really needed in the scene.
Now go back into "File, Edit, Create..." at the top left of the Daz Studio screen and under the "File" menu heading the one you want is Merge. Click on Merge and select the file you just saved that represents the camera settings. Presto, the camera will return to its original forward view. Double check that you haven't accidentally created any bad holes and render away, or turn the scene again and chop away more polygons before using the "Merge" trick again to bring the camera to its original position. Remember you are the boss and nobody needs to know what tricks you used to possibly save a bit of time get the finished image that you want! Also practice makes perfect.
Forgot to mention... most of the above is intended to encourage you to try and get SOME iray work out of your equipment. Nothing wrong with keeping the "quickie" background layer as small as possible and using minimal ray-traced shadows and no resource-intensive, deep shadow maps... and then separately rendering ONLY THE FIGURES say, in Iray with "Draw Ground" on to get some nice shadows. If you can use an image editor that supports layers then there is nothing wrong with pasting Iray figures, that are floating on a transparent field in a TIFF file, down over a quick background that was rendered in 3DL.
Sometimes to save rendering time you can draw your own shadows post-render, using an image editor. Both of the pictures below are based on 3DL renders. My little terrier dog has never been to Arizona but I layered him over a file made with an old DAZ background prop. Around his feet I lasso'ed a rough outline of what a shadow might look like and I darkened the area a bit with Contrast/Brightness. Similarly (isn't he just the Dickens?) he has never been to England but Dreamlight has a prop in DAZ that includes a blue sky and 3DL sunlight... just enough "light" coming in through the "cracks" of the "Neverhome" buildings by The Ant Farm to touch the pasted in photograph of the dog. And then I lasso'ed the ground near the dog's feet again, and I darkened the area a bit to suggest some shadows. Thinking about it now I guess I could make my shadows a bit darker to more-closely match Dreamlight's sun-shadows that 3DL rendered so nicely.
Bookmarking this definetly some great creative advice here. Thank you Roman_k2