Over 7 Hours and only 14%?

Hoofbeats

Hello Everyone!

I have only been using DAZ for a month or so, so I thought this would be an appropraite place to put this.

Currently I am working on a scene that has taken over 7 hours to render and is at only 14%. I have a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 that has 3GB of memory, and while I realize that this is a low end GPU for for DAZ rendering, I am confused about why it is taking so long. Right now I am trying to render a portrait scene of a woman (attached below) with a simple black background. I am only using Iray materials and lights, and the image is set to render with a canvas size of 2400 x 3000px. I have also hidden all parts of the body and dress that are not in the image to cut back on memory use and speed up render times.

The main thing that gets me, is that I have rendered larger scenes with a beach background, lights, and two fully clothed characters in less time than it is taking for this simple portrait to render. I have tried using SimTerno's memory assistant, however, even an empty scene says that I am using more memory than my GPU can support (I'm thinking of returning it). I have both my GPU and CPU checked in the render tab along with OPTIX prime acceleration to help speed up the render (I tried only using my GPU, but that yeilded a blank image).

I also have a second unsupported GPU and it's an Intel(R) HD Graphics 630 that works hand in hand with the CPU. I've noticed that under the task manager it is only sitting at .2 out of 7.9GB's shared memory available. Of course my NVIDIA GPU isn't workign as well.

I am at a total loss, so if anyone can help that would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

 

Richard Haseltine

Hair is usually slow, it has overlapping layers and it is shiny so the light patsh can bounce around a lot. Also, being irregular, it seems harder for Iray to determine that it is converged (the progress bar emasures how close the render is to the convergence target). The first question is whether your GPU is in fact being used - the Windows task Manager isn't always helpful for this, soemthign like GPU-Z may give a better answer https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/ .

Your Intel GPU can't help - Iray needs an nVidia GPU, with CUDA, if it is to use a GPU at all.

jestmart

The wings will be similar to the hair with overlapping and transparency mapping, in other words not a simple image at all to the render.

L'Adair

@cassandra_loves_horses, As Richard and jestmart pointed out, both the hair and the feathers of the wings will add a lot to the render time. Definitely download, install and use the GPU-Z software Richard linked to above. It will show you exactly how much of the GPU is in use. When you're rendering, it should indicate 99%-100% usage. If it's at 0%, you're rendering CPU Only.

GPU-Z also shows how much of the Nvidia card's memory is being used. If that seems high for the scene, and no render windows are open, try saving the scene, closing down Daz Studio, restart DS, and reopen your scene. (In fact, it's a good habit to get into for your final renders.)

Here are some other tips:

• With "only" 3GB of RAM on the Nvidia card, make sure other programs are closed when doing a render. Even minimized, other programs can be using some of your precious RAM.
• Make sure the Draw Mode of your Viewport is set to anything but Nvidia Iray. In my experience, having the viewport also trying to update slows down the render.
• Test your system with something simple to determine if Optix is actually helping. My testing showed Optix enabled actually slowed down my renders. Others say it sped things up. Find out for sure, for your computer. Then set this option accordingly.
• Stop using the Quality render setting. In Render Settings->Progressive Rendering:
  • Set "Rendering Quality Enable" to Off.
  • Set "Max Time" to 0. This effectively turns off the time limitations.
  • Use "Max Samples" to control the stop point of your renders.
    • You can manually stop the render when you like how it looks.
    • As long as you don't close the render window, you can increase the Max Samples and Resume rendering.
    • While rendering, from the render window, you can increase or decrease the Max Samples.
• Increase the amount of light in the image, and use Tone Mapping to make the render darker.
  • Unlock the Exposure Value setting and increase the value.
• Smaller dimensions will render faster. Daz Galleries display the image at 730 pixels wide, and link to the original image. Forum posts are limited to 800 pixels wide, (the mods will fix that if you don't.) If you're rendering to display on the forums or in the galleries, you can reduce the image size to 730-800 pixels wide to save on render time. (Assuming the height isn't something bizzare, like 10K!)
• If you need larger images, you may be able to render in phases. For example, in the image you shared, try rendering just the wings, (by hiding the figure, hair and clothing.) Then reverse the visibility and render figure without the wings. Layer the two together in your image editing program. (Gimp is open-source and free, if you don't already have an imaging editor.)

I hope some of these ideas will help make your experience better.

Hoofbeats

Hello everyone!

Thanks for all your wonderful advice. I went ahead and installed GPU-Z, and it said that my memory card had 0GB of RAM. I checked, and I guess a software update came out a couple days ago that was stopping the use of my GPU. Unfortunate, but at least it was a mostly simple fix. I went ahead updated, re-rendered and it took apprx. 15 hours instead of the 40+ that it was originally estimating.

@L'Adair After I updated my GPU driver it was showing between 95 - 96% usage, even though it was only using about 2GB or RAM during the render. Do you know if it will always show a high percentage like that even if it is not using the full amount of RAM (I know there is a compensation thing with some versions of Windows, though I can't remember what it's called)? I like that idea of rendering seperately though! I will have to try it some time. Hopefully that will help speed things up even more

SixDs

The usage that you are referring to is the usage of the GPU itself, not the video RAM.  It is normal during any render for the render engine to use all the available resources that it needs to complete the render, so that it can be completed in the shortest possible time. It will do that regardless of the amount of RAM being used (unless RAM is exceeded and the render defaults to your CPU).