Trying to set my expectations here: how fast my 2070 system should be?

doorknob22

Hola!

When I first started using Daz, a few months ago, I had a really really old system. Like "7 years ago, 8GB memory" old. Obviously rendering took 2 hours and results were grainy.

 

Recently I bought a new system: i7 CPU, 32 GB Ram, 2070 Super, SSD HD etc. When I render now, the results are awesome but I must admit I'm somewhat disappointed by the rendering time. I takes the computer some 30 minutes to render a room, two character and 5-6 additional (beer can sized) props. Render size is 1920 X 1440. 

 

I did not mess with any setting (other than removing the CPU from the rendering process because it was parking on 100%), just sort of trying to get a feeling of what to expect. I must admit that normal operating in Daz is lightening fast now and even the iRay preview takes seconds to render, it's justr that 30 minutes renders leave me a bit... underwhelmed.

So: is 30 minutes a reasonable time for a simple (IMO) scene like I described or am I driving with the brakes on without knowing? Any low hanging fruit for me to increase speed without sacrificing quality?

Thanks!

doorknob22

Minor update: rendering just the room (with all the out of the box props) without addining anything, took my system some 11 minutes. 

Please help me set my expectetions :)

Richard Haseltine

Lighting makes a huge difference - if your room is relying on the HDR light from outside then convergence will be slowed as you are waiting util enough light paths have bounced their way in and around to allow most of the scene to reach its final colour; by contrast, if you have plentiful light soruces in the room so that most areas are receiving direct light the process of covnergence is likely to be faster. In geenral the more visible areas there are that rely on bounced light to illuminate them the slower the render will be, and the noisier at any given stage.

Dim Reaper

I would recommend going to this benchmarking thread.  From there you can download the benchmark, run it and then compare your times on the benchmark to other 2070 Super cards.  At least it should let you know if you are in roughly the same area or if anything is not running correctly on your system.

Section 3 will give the render times which you can compare with your own.

JD_Mortal

30 min isn't bad. There are too many factors to tell if it is honestly "good". Set all default settings for rendering. Compare that time to CPU only rendering... If it takes 40 hours to get to the same point, then, yes it is good. You honestly can't compare something like a card-upgrade, and shouldn't be... As you should honestly be using both cards, at that point, over just one, or just one+CPU. Unless the other card wasn't being used for rendering, because it was an AMD or older nVidia without CUDA cores that could be used, or if it just had insufficient VRAM. However, it could still have been used for non-rendering calculations, like displaying the screen, to free-up VRAM for the dedicated rendering card, or for OPEN-CL calculations for the new D-cloth thing.

Translucent items and reflections can also majorly impact render-times, besides having insufficient lighting to actually render something.

Other things which impact speed, which may not be obvious, at first.

- Rendering texture sizes, constrained by the min/max threshold values in the advanced tab. Default is 512/1024. As well as the actual texture sizes. I don't know how they completely work in Daz, but if you don't want texture compression, you have to set both values to the largest value of the largest texture image in your scene. By default, I assume any image below the MIN value is ignored, while images above the MAX value are compressed DOWN to that value? (I know that using a 4096x4096 background, with those values, ends-up in the background looking like garbage, if you render the scene as a 4096x4096 image. Also the reason that the HDRI backgrounds look horribly blurry and disfigured with some odd JPG-like compression. Since they are all bigger than 1024-pixels large.)

- Rendering "quality", which is equivelant to how many passes, or photon-volume, must be completed, before a pixel is counted as "complete". (Pertains to the percentage of convergance, as a whole factor.) Render quality of 2 will essentially double the time it takes to complete the render. (I once thought this was sub-pixel/super-sampling, but later found-out it was just photon-resolution. The more light that hits the sub-pixels, contributes to the more correct pixel-represnetation of all combined sub-pixels. Which is also where larger textures come into play and higher polygon counts.

- Model's poly-surface sub-divisions or mesh sub-D levels. By default, the "view" setting, is normally one tick less than the "render" setting, on newer models. Even if the model wouldn't change quality, that is the default setting. EG, View is 1 sub-D level, and render is 2 sub-D levels. (Pointless for a model without curved surfaces, as the extra polygons still render as flat surfaces. EG, a cube will not have any render-noticable detail with 100 sub-divisions, it would still have six flat sides that just take a lot longer to render now. Unless you deform it into some other shape or make it explode. Then having more sub-division levels MAY have a purpose and function, but I have not seen that to be true in Daz3D. It is true for other programs.)

- Cutsom or Generic "catch-all", materials. Some custom materials may have been built with options that consume a lot more processing than others. While generic materials, built as a "catch all material", common for converting non-iray materials, may have slower rendeing. They may be running through shader-code that isn't even needed, unlike a custom shader that is built specific to use only what it needs.

- Depth of field, is another major render-time killer. You are essentially rendering multiple camera angles of the same scene, and the non-converged pixels are rendered across multiple sub-pixels, creating that depth-blur. It is the same effect that you get when you look through your eyes and focus on one specific point. Everything that is not in the center of your view, is out of focus, more as they are close and far from the focal-point. However, this works in multi-view mode, not in bi-view mode, like your eyes. Done to simulate old and low quality camera lenses that don't have linear-correction applied to them. (Now, these are considered artistic or desired, for various reasons.)

- Unseen objects, (unseen under normal situations), which have to ALSO be used in the rendering, even though you don't directly see them. They contribute to ambient reflected lighting, shadows, refraction, reflections, etc... (Almost every surface uses reflection, to a point. You have 6 layers of reflections and refractions just in each eyeball on a human model. Even though what they are reflecting may only be contributing to a single pixel of space in the final render.) Try removing unseen items and only add them back in, if you think they actually contributed to the look you were going for.