New rig, GPUs don't work
spuiaian
Posts: 0
Hi,
I'm not new to Daz Studio but I have been working on my Mac so far which went slow but steady. Recently I switched to Windows because I bought a rig from a failed crypto mining business that runs with 6 GTX 1080ti cards. I installed the latest drivers for the GTX cards and the device manager tells me they work fine although it only shows 5 cards. The Mainboard is a BTC 250 Pro, the CPU is a Intel Core i3-700, Ram is 16GB. The screen is connected with the hdmi-port of the first card, it's all a bit improvised but it works somehow.
Now my problem is that I seem to be unable to make use of the GPUs in Daz Studio. When I open more complex scenes with 4 caracters and lighting and then switch to Iray preview, Daz crashes after maybe half a minute and tells me there's a fatal error. If I try to render directly, Daz fails and says there's a error as well.
When I check the task manager in Windows I can see that Daz doesn't use the GPUs at all, even though they are listed in the Advanced tap and the Engine is set to NVIDIA Iray.
I'm lost here, can somebody help me find what's wrong? It can't be the temperature of the cards, since the ventilation system works well.
Any help is very much appreciated.
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Comments
The advice I have seen is that you need roughly twice as much system RAM as you have GPU RAM - so that is potentially 110GB if you try using all of the cards. Have you tried using just one, with a really simple scene (like a cube on its own)?
I've been dealing with the same issues as well, and so far I see no solutions other than simply quitting on trying to do complex scenes anymore, but it's tough. I've been doing them ever since Poser. So its impossible to give it up. I got that fatal error message a few times as well.
Several issues.
1) You need one CPU thread for every GPU. All the i3's that work on a B250 motherboard are dual core so no more than 2 GPU's will work in iRay.
2) Task manager does not accurately reflect CUDA usage. You will need to set one of the graphs under the GPU tabs to CUDA to see if iRay is using the 2 GPU's (pull the rest).
3) 16Gb is not enough to hanlde trasnferring data to a 1080ti. Not sure if the amount of RAM needed goes up with multiple GPU's.
4) If you get that stuff resolved and the problems persist there are many other things that could be wrong.
FWIW, you can almost certainly sell half of your 1080 Ti's for enough to finance a new i7 w/ 64 GB RAM.
Note that it doesn't matter how many GPUs you have, the scene must still fit within the VRAM of a single GPU. If it doesn't then it's still going to drop to CPU rendering and with your i3 and 16Gb of RAM, it's going to be an issue since the RAM requirements for a scene are higher than the VRAM requirements due to compression. I've tried some scenes with multiple complex characters that definitely don't fit in VRAM and crash my 2600X 16Gb RAM when trying CPU as it just doesn't fit.
You can lower scene complexity in various ways, break up the scene, there's several options for optimization. But the best advice I think was given, sell some of your 1080Ti's and get a new CPU and larger RAM.
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback. I see there are a few things I didn't have in mind and didn't even know when I bought this crypto machine. Selling a part of it to upgrade the other slower parts seems like a reasonable solution. I will try that. So you think having 3 GTX 1080ti fully working would still be sufficient for doing complex scenes and animations, right?
For animating complex scenes, it's going to be an overnight affair in any case. So the question becomes not "What is the absolute fastest rig I can afford" but rather "What is the cheapest one that is still likely to have finished by the time I wake up?"
For a typical 10 or so second shot, even just two 1080tis would probably do. You'll be happy with three.
It depends on what you mean by complex. If the scene is more than 11Gb on the GPU then no number of 1080ti's will help. If the scene fits on the cards then it is a matter of figuring out how many you need to keep to achieve your goals.
What I'd is check prices of what you need to upgrade, figure out how many 1080ti'sthat equals and then go from there.
A new i7 7700 is $365 on Amazon right now. 4 x 16Gb RAM sticks can be had for $260 on NewEgg. So what are 1080ti's going for?
To follow @kenshaw011267 above post, According to Nvidia the RTX 2080TI, RTX2080 Super, RTX2080, and RTX 2070 Super with NVLink are supposed to support shared VRam. I Believe that feature is available in the Studio 4.12 Beta.
That might be the future for animators who work in DS, however is it ever going to be worth that sort of investment to do animation using DS?
1. check the gpu bios's to make sure they aren't moded for mining.
you'll need to search(google) for this as I won't point to any specific article, since i don't have the direct familiarity to recommend a particular process for checking and flashing, if necessary.
2. check your TIM(thermal interface material), could be it just needs replacing.
3. Try testing each card individually. It's entirely possible that one, or more, of the cards are defective. or it may be an extension board issue or motherboard issue.
4. Get MSI afterburner and try tweaking some of the settings to see if there's an issue. Ramp up fans to check for thermal issues, try overclocking, undervolting etc to check for possible card failures.
due to this being a mining board, there may be some nuances specific to it and you may need to play with bios settings and possibly port assignments(switch the adapters around) to correct the issue.
Given that this mobo maxes at 2 sticks of ram, that ram recommendation isn't applicable.
Bog standard 32GB ddr4(2133) can be had on ebay for aroud $100-150 in dual 16GB sticks. Averaging around $3-5 a GB, depending on manufacturer, speed, and other specs.
As far as the CPU, since DS doesn't utilize multi-core systems very much, the dual core could suffice for quite some time.
From a practical standpoint, the i5 6600 would be a better upgrade at $100 usd on ebay, or the i5 7600 for about $150.
The i7 7700 can be had for around $250 average. with 6th gen around $200.
Looking over various benchmarking results, the i7 isn't that much of an improvement compared to the i5's.
Workload and software optimization dependent of course.
considering what most of us spend on DS assets?
This is false. The Daz Studio application itself is generally not very multi-thread intensive. But as already mentioned by @kenshaw011267, Iray requires at least one logical CPU thread per physical GPU in a system in order to maintain synchronisation between them during the rendering process. And in situations where there are fewer cores than physical GPUs available, it will simply skip over those cards completely. For a six GPU system you would need at least a 6 thread processor (3 cores multi-threaded) at minimum to reach full utilzation even with all other hardware issues resolved.
Under normal conditions, the ideal minimum amount of system memory for Iray rendering in Daz Studio is at least 2 times the maximum video memory capacity of your biggest GPU (see here for a detailed explanation of why.) Since your system is all 1080Ti's (11GB), that would make your ideal minimum 22GB.
I track my purchases, they are a business expense, and I spent a couple of hundred dollars last year.
A dual RTX rig to use NVLink is not going to be cheap by any standard.
2 2070 Supers minimum at $500 each. $100 for the NVLink bridge.
Athlon 3000G (cheapest dual core CPU new on the market) $55
A motherboard with 2 x16 slots that supports the 3000G $100
32Gb RAM sticks $120
500W PSU (the bare minimum for this) $40
Case ~$50
And how ever much storage you need to actually hold the OS, DS and your assets ?
So something like $1500US for a system that can run renders and not much else.Realistically more like $2000 or more. If I was making money doing animations it might be workable, depending onhow much you make obv, but that's a big investment for a hobby.
@kenshaw011267 "Realistically more like $2000 or more. If I was making money doing animations it might be workable, depending onhow much you make obv, but that's a big investment for a hobby."
Your definition of hobby must be pretty limited.