Scenes not rendering in Iray unless rendered in OpenGL first
mclaugh
Posts: 221
OK, this is weird.
Picked up a new laptop (Dell G5 gaming, 16GB Ram, GTX 1060/6Gb) over the weekend. Downloaded/installed DS 4.11 (was running 4.10 previously) and the current driver from NIVIDIA, and transferred the content library from my old laptop. Fired up 4.11 and took it for a spin. Everything worked as expected until I went to render.
Blank render.
Tried again ... blank render.
Quit DS, restarted, loaded scene, hit "render," ... blank render.
Deleted scene, loaded another scene, hit "render," ... blank render.
Double-checked that DS is set to render on GPU only.
Tried again ... blank render.
Hmm ... what happens if I switch to OpenGL ... BOOM! scene rendered.
Switch back to Iray, hit "render," ... Hey! Presto! Scene rendered!
Load another scene, hit "render," ... blank. Switch to OpenGL, hit "render," ... scene rendered. Back to iray, hit "render," ... scene rendered.
Tried dozens of different scenes over the past couple of days, some loaded from my library, some created from scratch. Doesn't matter if it's a complex scene or a single primitive: it's always the same thing—iRay spits out blank renders until I render in OpenGL.
Anyone else run into this behavior? Any ideas what's going on, and how to fix it?
Thanks.
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Update: according to DAZ tech support, it's an issue that can crop up if you're not running the latest drivers. Unfortunately, Nvidia Smart Scan says I already have the latest Studio driver (431.70) installed.
Should I be running the game ready driver instead?
I usually do run the "game ready" ones, but I also play games on my graphics computer so it makes sense for me.
I also guess that starting studio with the opengl viewport is the usual way people goes by. Since the iray viewport is rather heavy and it is intended for previews before rendering, not for working on the scene. This is not to say it's not a bug, but just that most users would never meet it.
Also personally I'd never go with a laptop for a graphics workstation, since the cooling system is very limited and nvidia cards heavily depend on it. A 1060 on a desktop will always perform much better.
I'm not starting studio in iray viewport. I'm starting in texture shaded. It renders just fine when I switch to iray preview, but won't output an iray render unless I do an OpenGL render first.
Actually, that's no longer true: I upgraded to the 436.15 game-ready driver, as directed by tech support, and now it won't output an iray render at all, even after doing an OpenGL render. And iray preview still works.
Renndering on a desktop rather than a laptop is great IF YOU ACTUALLY HAVE A DESKTOP. Some of us don't have that option.
OK, now this is getting stupid.
I switched CPU rendering back on in the Advanced tab, and now iray renders just fine. GPU-Z shows 100% load on the 1060, 1-2% load on the UHD 630. Still getting a blank render on the first attempt after launching DS or waking from hibernate/sleep, though.
If it may help, I had an issue on my old laptop where I had to launch daz studio twice to get iray working. I never fixed it. Blender was working fine at the first run though. So I guess it may be something related to the way daz studio and/or iray deal with the driver. My desktop works fine.
Sounds like it is just an issue with your GPU chip/card. Having the latest drivers will only help if... The issue was fixed in the newer drivers, or there was an issue with older drivers, which was non-specific to your GPU. It could also be a combined issue with iRay itself.
This sounds specific to your GPU... On that laptop. Remember, the GPU they use in a laptop is not the same as an actual GPU-card setup. It is for moble devices, which have a strong power limitation and odd things like shared-memory and resources. (Make sure it is plugged-in when you render, or it is forced into low-power mode and high-monitoring mode.)
I would suggest that you try the 4.12-Beta version, if you are going to use your CPU, and to see if this still happens with just the GPU. It uses a newer version of iRay, closer to what the latest drivers are setup to handle. As well as having better CPU processing with the new iRay core files. It may be more kind to your struggling laptop.
Not an expert. so take this as a suggestion, but when I went through putting everything on a new machine Windows would update to a driver that would overwrite the Nvidia one, causing me to have to reinstall the nvidia latest driver.
When you loaded up the new laptop, did Windows run through a big update?
It may have reset your driver. I fixed it by reloading the Nvidia driver direct from their site, after windows finished with its updating.
Then (sorry, not at my Daz machine to be mroe precise), went into device settings in windows and disabled automatic driver updates for my GPU.
Thank the Dragons I'm not the only one with this issue..
I was running 4.11 Beta on a Desktop and had no issues with rendering. Then I DL'd 4.12 Beta. Right out the box, blank render. Found out I had to have BOTH GPU and CPU ticked in the Photoreal Devices tab in render settings. I also had issues with dForce freezing my PC. I updated my Gtx 1070 driver. However, when I used 4.11 beta, I could untick CPU and render just fine. I uninstaled 4.12 . dForce works again but I still had to have CPU ticked. to render.
After reading Umi no Senshi no Ishi's post, I decided to go directly to Nvidia. Yup. Nvidia Experience didn't install the latest driver, yet told me I was up to date. So I did a manual DL and install of the latest driver. Rebooted PC and voila.. No need to tick CPU anymore. But I'm still wary of 4.12.
Thank you Umi.
My laptop hasn't ever been online, not even my local wired-only network, so I'm reasonably certain that it's not a Windows driver update issue. (Drivers and updates are downloaded manually (in a vm running) on a dedicated computer on a separate network, and transferred via sneaker-net.) Plus, I disabled automatic updates right out of the box and have clean installed 4 different driver versions d/led directly from NVIDIA over the course of the past week (436.15 GRD, 436.30 GRD, 431.86 Studio, and 431.36 Studio).
artofsuiter: apparently it's a known, and not uncommon, issue. First email reply I got from DS tech support said they've seen it alot with drivers updates, and that they've been in contact with NVIDIA to identify and fix whatever it is that's borked.