Creator vs Game Drivers required for 4.12 to work with GPU render?

inacentaur

Hi! I noticed that my 2x geforce 980 cards aren't being used for render for the new 4.12 public Daz... it's brought render times up at least 5 times or more... I don't think creator drivers are supported for my GPUs as they are on the latest drivers 460.36...

 

Does 4.12 require newer or studio/creator graphics cards? 

Lindsey

I have a GTX 980 and am using Nvidia 460.31 Desktop driver with DS 4.12.

The installer download is 431.60-desktop-win8-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe

I typically don't update the Nvidia driver unless something isn't working, like DS Iray rendering.

L'Adair

inacentaur said:

Hi! I noticed that my 2x geforce 980 cards aren't being used for render for the new 4.12 public Daz... it's brought render times up at least 5 times or more... I don't think creator drivers are supported for my GPUs as they are on the latest drivers 460.36...

 

Does 4.12 require newer or studio/creator graphics cards? 

I'm using the 430.86 Studio drivers. With the version of Iray used by DS 4.12,  I believe 430.86 is the earliest driver that will work.

As for the difference between Game Ready and Studio dirvers, here's a quote off the Nvidia site

All NVIDIA drivers provide full features and application support for top games and creative applications.

If you are a gamer who prioritizes day of launch support for the latest games, patches, and DLCs, choose Game Ready Drivers.

If you are a content creator who prioritizes stability and quality for creative workflows including video editing, animation, photography, graphic design, and livestreaming, choose NVIDIA Studio Driver.

If you are both a gamer and creator, choose Game Ready Drivers.

A search of drivers for the GTX 980 on the Nvidia website shows only Game Ready Drivers, but based on the above information, it shouldn't make a difference for your computer. As long as you install 430.86 or later drivers, you shouldn't have any trouble rendering with your video cards, with the usual caveat: any scene that won't fit on the video card's RAM will use the CPU for rendering.

inacentaur

Hmm How do you know if the scene is too large for the GPU? 

L'Adair

inacentaur said:

Hmm How do you know if the scene is too large for the GPU? 

Uh, it drops to CPU?

How much RAM are your cards rated for? 4GBs?

The way Iray works, it will use both cards, if you set it up that way, but the scene will need to fit on the 4GBs. You'll have doubled your CUDA cores, making it faster than one card, but it doesn't double the RAM. Assuming you're running Windows, some of the 4GBs of each card will be reserved, so the actual threshold will be less that 4GB.

If you haven't already got it, I highly recommend the Z-GPU utility. It will monitor a lot of things about your GPU, but the only ones I ever pay attention to are memory used on the video card and percentage of use of the GPU. After a while, you'll have a good idea if your scene is going to drop to CPU.

DS has a tendency to hold onto the card's RAM, so it may help to save the scene, close DS, reopen DS and reload the scene, and then render.

Sometimes the RAM used by the scene will appear to be too low to push you into CPU Only rendering, but it does anyway. In my own experience, that is more likely to happen when you set the High Resolution of a mesh to a high Subdivision Level. I've also seen it happen with large volumes of instancing.

With DS 4.12 and Nvidia's 430.86 driver, I've noticed more of the RAM is used now before it drops to CPU Only than was once the case. I used to see it drop off at just under 7GB, (of an 8GB card,) but now I'm seeing GPU renders with memory in the 7.4 to 7.6 range.

I hope this info is helpful in some way.