Add older gen card to pipeline

azrael_dark

Hi,

Currently I'm rendering on a 980ti and for my desired scene complexity/quality, it takes about 1 and a half hour per scene give or take. I need to do a lot of scenes per day. That amout of rendering time maybe allows me to do 4 scenes a day. I want to reduce rendering time at least a bit more. 

Now I have an old GTX 680 back at my parents house. My question is if I add this, do I get any gains at all in rendering time? It's 2 generation older but I figure the extra Cuda cores and 2 gigs of VRAM would help a little wouldn't it?

Need advice since it's a weekend drive to go get the card and dig it out.

Many thanks.

SixDs

The extra CUDA cores would help, except for the fact that any scenes that require more than 2 GB of vram will drop the GTX 680 altogether. VRAM is not additive between cards.

kenshaw011267

Your best bet is a software solution rather than a hardware one.

The Render Queue plugin

https://www.daz3d.com/render-queue

Will let you setup many scenes to render and then renders them unattended when you aren't using the computer, like when you're asleep/at work. That would let you get a lot more renders done per day.

azrael_dark

SixDs said:

The extra CUDA cores would help, except for the fact that any scenes that require more than 2 GB of vram will drop the GTX 680 altogether. VRAM is not additive between cards.

So you're saying that if total memory consumption exceeds 2GB the 680 won't be used at all? Right now most of my scenes are around 10-16GB on textures alone. Was hoping it would still be used while system ram/page file would take up the excess

kenshaw011267 said:

Your best bet is a software solution rather than a hardware one.

The Render Queue plugin

https://www.daz3d.com/render-queue

Will let you setup many scenes to render and then renders them unattended when you aren't using the computer, like when you're asleep/at work. That would let you get a lot more renders done per day.

Had a look. Usefull but I would have to change my workflow. Seems you need each scene saved in it's own .duf. My "scenes" are just saved puppeteer dots inside a main .duf scene file. I got bunches of em for each characters, poses, camera, lights, ect. I only start a new scene .duf on complete enviroment change.
 

 

kenshaw011267

You can have the queue render every active camera if that works for you. Also changing your workflow might not be a bad idea. With multiple renders reliant on one file you risk a corruption in that file costing you a huge amount of work. I've had issues where a .duf got corrupt and would not load no matter what. Multiple saved scenes provides you protection over that kind of loss.

Also 16Gb of textures as loaded into VRAM? You'd need a Quadro or a Titan RTX to handle that.

Kitsumo

kenshaw011267 said:

You can have the queue render every active camera if that works for you. Also changing your workflow might not be a bad idea. With multiple renders reliant on one file you risk a corruption in that file costing you a huge amount of work. I've had issues where a .duf got corrupt and would not load no matter what. Multiple saved scenes provides you protection over that kind of loss.

Also 16Gb of textures as loaded into VRAM? You'd need a Quadro or a Titan RTX to handle that.

OP could be referring to the system RAM usage. In my case it's common for Daz Studio to use about 10 Gb of system RAM while using only 4 or 5 Gb of VRAM. I'm guessing that Iray shuffles a lot of data around in system RAM and only sends the most vital stuff to the GPU.

Richard Haseltine

Kitsumo said:

kenshaw011267 said:

You can have the queue render every active camera if that works for you. Also changing your workflow might not be a bad idea. With multiple renders reliant on one file you risk a corruption in that file costing you a huge amount of work. I've had issues where a .duf got corrupt and would not load no matter what. Multiple saved scenes provides you protection over that kind of loss.

Also 16Gb of textures as loaded into VRAM? You'd need a Quadro or a Titan RTX to handle that.

OP could be referring to the system RAM usage. In my case it's common for Daz Studio to use about 10 Gb of system RAM while using only 4 or 5 Gb of VRAM. I'm guessing that Iray shuffles a lot of data around in system RAM and only sends the most vital stuff to the GPU.

DS has to keep track of rigging, morphs, and other deformers - Iray gets only the baked result of those.

azrael_dark

kenshaw011267 said:

You can have the queue render every active camera if that works for you. Also changing your workflow might not be a bad idea. With multiple renders reliant on one file you risk a corruption in that file costing you a huge amount of work. I've had issues where a .duf got corrupt and would not load no matter what. Multiple saved scenes provides you protection over that kind of loss.

Also 16Gb of textures as loaded into VRAM? You'd need a Quadro or a Titan RTX to handle that.

Now that you mentioned it, yeah that would be an issue. I'll change my style in my next one. It was a toss up between a bunch of files and a bunch of dots. And I chose dots. Not the brightest idea in hindsight.

Yeah 16 gb of textures loaded on device (0). Which is my 980ti. That's why I was guessing the excess goes to system RAM.

Thanks all. 

kenshaw011267

It doesn't work that way. The numbers Daz posts are pretty much useless. If the entire scene can't load into the GPU VRAM the render drops to the CPU.

What Daz is reporting, I think, is the uncompressed sizes for the textures. Textures get compressed before loading into VRAM. You can control exactly how in the render settings.