A need for speed........speedy renders! :)
RKane_1
Posts: 3,037
Are there some basic settings I may be missing to make my renders and posing and Dforce simulations go faster?
Inform me, oh wise ones! :)
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This may help. It's a summary of my system:
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Operating System - Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU - AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 49 °C withThuban 45nm Technology
RAM - 32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 669MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard - Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. GA-990FXA-UD5 (Socket M2) 40 °C
Graphics - SAMSUNG (1920x1080@60Hz) , HP 22yh (1920x1080@60Hz), & Cintiq 24HD (1920x1200@59Hz) running on a 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (Gigabyte) 55 °C
Storage - 931GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 ATA Device (SATA ) 36 °C, 2794GB Hitachi HUS724030ALE641 ATA Device (SATA ) 42 °C, 3726GB Seagate ST4000DM000-1F2168 ATA Device (SATA ) 34 °C, 1863GB Western Digital WD Ext HDD 1021 USB Device (USB (SATA) ) 32 °C, 5589GB Western Digital WD My Book 25EE USB Device (USB (SATA) ) 31 °C
Optical Drives - HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS70 ATA Device
Audio - Realtek High Definition Audio
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Anything (Other than buiying a new computer) that could help me speed up my renders and the operation of DAZ?
Hmmm, must faster than mine but I can tell you:
a) at least in DS PB 4.12+, turning on Spectral Rendering is like rendering a thin clear coat of mud that ruins the scene's contrast when you render so your render will likely converge sooner to your liking with Spectral Rendering turned off (not saying it will actually converge to a computer decided algorithmic faster, just to your liking fast).
b) turn the quality assurance to 95% and quality level 1.0
c) if you can, avoid rendering bigger than 1920x1920.
d) Turn on caustic and architectural sampling.
If you haven't upgrade your public beta to DS PB 4.12+ as it's iRay SDK is faster than it used to be.
Those are what I personally do but really there's not really a lot you can do.
There is a fellow called WP Guru that has a video on YouTube on what he recommends to speed up iRay renders and also DAZ 3D themselves has a video on YouTube on how they recommend to speed up iRay renders but really, they are telling you to trade convergence quality for faster render times and then shrink the image rendered in post processing to get a bicubic resample to occur and blur the artifacts out visibility (in most cases).
Really? I would have thought turning those on would slow your render down, because it's doing more processing.
Do not bother with architectural sampling. It is deprecated.
To speed up rendering reduce texture sizes in the scene. Scene Ootimizer is a script for sale here that will do the entire scene for you. Doing it manually is possible but very time consuming.
I agree with @Kenshaw, get the scene optimizer addon.
Also, assuming you use iray, you can use the denoiser to get decent results with far less iterations. This way the final rendering will always lose some details though due to the denoiser. Finally you could upgrade your card. With 32G ram you can handle up to a 12G card so the choice is up to you. As far as you have room for the card and a good cooling system and psu. A better card will also make dforce faster.
Well, if the calculations is saying 2x2=4 instead of 0.5+0.5+0.5+0.5+0.5+0.5+0.5+0.5=4 then the first is faster but according the other fellow it's deprecated now so I guess not. I turned it on starting with 4.12 and noticed much faster render times (I have no discrete GPU) so I thought "great! it helps render faster". Apparently then it does nothing anymore. I will turn it off but I'm still getting faster render times in 4.12.
On the caustic sampling I'm not 100% sure, but as it should prevent noise and in doing so cause the render to converge faster because the noise is reduced but I've never timed it. It doesn't seem to have a huge effect that I can see with my eye or in render times so I guess it's dependent on the shader materials largely in convergence improvements you can actually see. Otherwise, why even have it in the UI?
4.12 renders faster period.
I've tested caustic sampling on and off quite a few times and on is slower but if you are doing something that should have a very obvious caustic reflection, which I've never done, maybe it would matter.
You the Public Pool that was a freebie a while back might make a good test as I think that water in it is considered caustic. I thought the eye moisture was a use case for it too but I guess not. I'm not sure. I will try the Public Pool, caustic on & off sometime this week & see if it makes a difference.
Even navigation on my system seems slow.
How do I make sure I am optimizing the VRAM on my system for the 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti?
My system feels slower than a lot of ones I've seen in tutorials and I checked the tuts were not sped up.
With only 2GB of RAM on your video card most scenes you would render are likely going to wind up being CPU renders. Are you iRay rendering or 3DL rendering.
Also, 16GB of system RAM, not GPU RAM does a lot to speed up the system. One thing I've notice though is DAZ 4.12+ is making my system slower too although DAZ Studio itself is faster.
A 980ti is a 6GB video card
I almost fell for this until I read the comments
There are a few things I do to get render times down but never the same for every render. I have a default scene that loads when I start Studio or start a new scene with all my default settings. After I load things in I adjust the Environment settings and Tone Mapping to get the look I want as near as I can and start a render to see what needs changing. I don't touch the Textures and have Medium Threshold at 4096 and High at 16384 I also have the Dome set to Finite Sphere, Resolution 16500 and Radius at 400. I have attached my default scene which when loaded will show all my start settings before I adjust them for a scene.
I start a render and let it run for a while to see how long it takes to A) The first target canvas was written, I have it set to Min 5 Iterations, which on the one below was 4 mins 20 secs after I did the changes. As long as it is 4 mins or lower on the starting render I leave it, anything higher and I start to make changes, and B) how long it takes for the progress bar to show the percentage. Not always a good sign of being slow as I have seen it jump from nothing after 20 minutes or so to 30% or more. I have it set for converged ratio of 95%.
First I select everything in the Scene Tab and go to the Surfaces Tab and Select all there and see if everything is Iray, if not I deselect them and click on each one and run the Iray Uber Shader on the ones that aren't Iray.
This is when it gets complicated as I then change settings for each shader starting with Base Mixing (Roughness to Glossiness or just leave it at Metalicity if it is a metalic object and change Metalicity to 1.00), Glossy Layered Weight to 1.00, Colour to White, Glossiness to 0.10 ( usually for walls, floors furniture etc.), 0.3 for skin, hair some vegetation (although that might go to 0.80 for some plants or metal objects). This can also vary from scene to scene depending what works. Refraction Index I change to whatever material it is.
I then render again to check the Canvas Draw time. If it is lower than the original then I will leave it to run for a while to see how fast it renders, if not it is back to tweaking. Lowering or raising light intensity, colour, position. Changing the Nominal Luminance under the Firefly Filter from my default of 1500 either up or down to get rid of the bright spots. You have to be careful with this setting when using the Bloom Filter as it can kill the Bloom :)
There is a lot more but this is more or less the main ones.......I think :)
This went 16 hours and only 45% done the first time I rendered it so I did a few changes and got the time down. It would probably have gone two days if I had left it :) I could have stopped this at 10 or 12 hours at 90% and not seen much of a difference but, as I wasn't too bothered I let it run.
2019-09-10 10:38:49.672 Total Rendering Time: 1 days 1 hours 18 minutes 18.88 seconds
The War Room
Click on image for full size.
OK, so that will do many scene is they are careful to avoid fibre hair, no more than 3 characters, and are very restrained in using opacity and have simple sets generally speaking.
What video card would be the card of choice to upgrade to for Iray rendering and uising DAZ?
The best RTX card you can afford.
Just make sure that wherever you buy it from are good with returns. A lot of RTX cards are arriving DOA or dieing quickly. Seems to be less common with the super cards, but still present from what I am reading in forums about it.
Is there an older but more proven to be stable card?
Better than the one I have but still pretty new and faster?
Not easily available new. You can look on the used market for a 1080ti.
Set up the RTX 2080 in the weekend. Really impressed!
30 frame test animation (1920x1080) rendered in 21 minutes. Turned down max iterations to 250 and you can only see the tiniest bit of noise. Very happy.
What did that set you back? $$$ Roughly. :)
2080 super cost me 1500(canada dollar) with a 2 year protection plan, so far it's pretty impressive. I can use iray preview for actually setting up scenes now, and not just checking the lighting as the last step. Renders roughly 3 times as fast as my 1070 in the things I have tried so far.