Aux Viewport Iray Preview slower than molasses
vonHobo
Posts: 1,706
When I select the NVIDIA Iray preview in the Aux Viewport it seems to take forever to show the preview.
It says "Preparing Scene ... " in the status bar at the bottom of the workspace and the yellow progress bar cycles over and over again.
I'm not lying when I say that I can get a faster image to render by doing the full image render in the Viewport itself.
I thought the whole purpose of the Aux Viewport was to get a quicker preview of the finished render scene, lights, etc.
What is the point of using it if it takes longer than an actual full render?
Do I have some sort of setting wrong or something?
I have a state of the art Alienware Desktop, just purchased 6 months ago, with 32 GB RAM. So I don't get it. 
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It's always been like that for me, regardless of which ersion of Studio, or what hardware I use. So I assume this is normal. I currently have 32 GB of ram and a GTX-1080 GPU, with updated NVIDIA drivers and Windows 10.
The Aux Viewport was originally added, pre-Iray, for the 3Delight IPR (Interactive Preview Render). It won't have any advantage for Iray over the regular Viewport, other than size once the actual rendering starts. If it vis being exceptionally slow to start that seems odd, but I would suspect something in the Draw Settings pane (which is what controls the preview render).
Thanks for the feedback. I will look at the Draw Settings pane for sure.
Wish they had a nice and fast Iray preview window. It would make a world of difference.
Absolutely agreed.
While the iray viewport performance itself works really well with my 2 RTX cards it still takes ages to switch from texture shaded to iray. No matter if i use the main or the aux viewport. That really slows down any worflow.
I´m quite familiar with Iray and i like the relults one can achieve with it but i´m so much tempted to learn Octane now just because of it´s much quicker viewport.
Haven't heard of Octane. I'll have to check that out. Thanks MC-P.
The transfer from DS to GPU, which is the stage at which the Viewport is in Smooth Shaded, will be governed by the settings chosen and by the system speed and PCIe slot speed, I would not expect the power of the GPU itself to be the most important factor (I'm not sure how much impact it would have at all).
One quick thing to check - is this in the beta? If so, are you using a sufficiently recent driver - otherwise the redner will be using CPU instead of GPU, though that would also greatly slow full renders.
Thank you Richard. I am not using the beta version of DAZ Studio. And the full renders are actually pretty quick on my machine.
Most of the time the Aux Viewport will render in Iray fairly quickly, but there are just some scenes where it seems to take forever (in fact never even finish), so I just give up and go on to the full render which does not take nearly as long as the preview, which is what I find frustrating. Something in the scenes must be holding up the Aux Viewport at times.
Also, leaving the Aux Viewport in Iray slows down the main Viewport work to a crawl, especially moving scene objects and views. So I typically don't use it unless I'm ready to see the HDR and light effects which are not visible in Texture Shaded.
I am using the default Draw Settings, and I don't see any parameter in the Settings to speed up the Aux Viewport render so I guess it's just a matter of knowing it's limitations.
I am happy to report that I have found a solution to the Aux Viewport Iray preview slowing everything down in my Workspace.
I just closed the Aux Viewport completely, and no longer use it.
Instead, if I want an Iray preview, I just select "NVIDIA Iray" from the DrawStyle menu dropdown at the top right of the main Viewport.
I don't understand why, but the main Viewport renders an Iray preview so much quicker than the smaller Aux Viewport. Not only that, but moving objects or the perspective around within the scene is very responsive now.
I just wish I had tried this months ago.
Maybe DAZ Studio works quicker now by not having to manage the Aux Viewport in my Workspace???
If anyone knows why this is, let me know. But to be honest, I prefer to have the nice big main Viewport Iray preview of the scene, vs. the tiny Aux Viewport anyway. So I'm glad it worked out this way.
Goodbye Aux Viewport!