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Yep, the video card drivers are always the first thing I update. On laptops they are always out of date 9desktops too).
I'd be careful about assuming that the percentage of VRAM in use indicates how much more you can throw in there. I think IRay has some compression algorithm which allows it to compress textures more (not talking Scene Optimizer now) if VRAM is close to overload. All I know is that just when I thought that another character would push it over the limit, it hasn't. On the other hand, I've had scenes with only two characters drop to CPU so I really don't know how it allocates memory.
The card as shipped probably would have worked with some software but not others. For example I am sure it would have worked fine with many older 3D games. However recently new versions of DS have required driver upgrades because the newer version of Iray packaged inside them has needed the latest drivers.
Most people aren't using their GPU for rendering, they only use it for watching youtube videos, playing video games etc.
Such a coincidence you mentioned this. I did a test yesterday before heading to bed at 3am. I applied Scene Optimizer to the same scene and the strange thing is, the scaled down version (divided by 2) actually took 94% of the GPU memory versus 84% when using the original, unscaled down version. I was very puzzled to say the least...
Did you close and reload the scene? Sounds like the original (larger) textures were still loaded in VRAM along with the new (smaller) textures.
- Greg
Yes I did.
Did you restart Daz Studio?
Yes. I saved the watered down scene. Shut DS. Waited. Reopened DS and reloaded the watered down scene.
While we are on this, what are all your most used options for SO? So far I've only tried the /2, /4 options and tried removing all displacement maps in tab 1. On the second tab, I've looked at decreasing subD but didn't need to in this scene as most were already at subD 1. Haven't really studied the other options as they seemed more involved.
Remember that Iray applies it own internal compression to the loaded graphic assests to try and keep the render in GPU. It only triggers that if otherwise there would not be room for the textures. It is possible that with the scaled down textures that internal compression would not be needed, so the actually used space is greater than the non-scaled. There are a lot of factors to consider when looking at GPU memory usage. Iray tends to take advantage of the hardware it has, which is why the same scene will take more VRAM in an 11GB card than a 4GB one, even though it fits on both.
Yes, and keep that in mind.
There is the option to save the reduced size textures in another location. If you do not, they are saved in the same location as the original textures. I do that, to reduce bloat in my Daz library on my SSD.
That's clever thinking - makes complete sense to me.
Actually what I did was save the original as ABC.duf and saved the file a second time as ABC_low.duf and then applied SO to the second file. This way, whatever happens with SO, I will still have my original file.
Before you run Scene Optimizer it is a good idea to run the companion script to Store Scene Texture Map State. That makes it real easy to later run the corresponding Restore script to restore the original texture to one or more items or surfaces, if you see artifacts due to the reduced texture on that item.
Also be aware the PNG files will not be reduced unless you select the PNG option(s) in the Scene Optimizer. PNG files have some characteristics that make funny things happen sometimes, so they are not selected by default. The user guide tries to explain it, but it is complicated.
Deja vu :P :D
I do something similar except that I create my own characters by mixing skins and adjusting parameters and then save the character for use in any upcoming scene. I concentrate on characters because they tend to have lots of big texture maps so I don't worry too much about props. I save the character as a Scene Subset such as Jennifer_SO_SUB which indicates that she is a scene SUBset with Scene Optimizer applied. When it comes to props and buildings (room interiors, etc.), I mostly swap out the texures for IRay shaders - I have gathered lots over the years and I think they are less demanding in terms of VRAM (but I could be wrong). They do seem to render faster than textures but that too might be my imagination. I often create rooms from kits like the Collective3D kits and apply shaders to the walls, etc.
Out of curiosity, which are the SO options that you utilise most often, from each of the 3 tabs?
I thoought you'd catch that reference to the DIM thread!
I tend to reduce the 4k maps by half and the 8k by 4 so I end up with 2k maps. Other than that, I like to keep as much detail as possible so I don't delete normal/displacement maps and I leave the mesh resolution at 3 because I a lot of my scenes involve characters close to the camera - I don't do many renders with characters in the distance.
i find every time nvidia does an update, renders will start going to CPU more often. not necessarily a DELL issue if nvidia updated during that time is where i'm going, and i hate to defend dell, because... well. they're dell...
I tried scene optimizer but it takes so long that you might as well just start rendering. By the time SO has done it's thing your scene is 25% done rendering. I have scenes with up to 8-12 G8 characters and some props, large HDRI's etc. My 1080 TI with 11 GB RAM runs out of memory fast. The CPU is the one doing all the work. I have a 10 Core / 20 Thread Core I9 and it really gets the job done. The system has 128 GB RAM so it never runs out of memory. The other nice thing is you can set the affinity of your processors in Task Manager. That way I can have my scene render in the background and still browse, watch videos or do Photoshop work by freeing up two processors. You can't do that with the GPU. If the GPU is rendering your system slows to a crawl.
I am not really impressed with the speed of the 1080 TI either. With one character in the scene I really can't tell if the GPU is really faster than the CPU. It seems like it still takes a long time to finish a rendering. Granted I render at high resolutions of 10,000 x 5,625 pixels but you'd think if the GPU was so great it would render one G8 character in 1 minute without any noise?!
Anothe trick is to render half way to 60% of your max time. Then run the denoiser from Intel on the rendered image. I have been getting good results this way.
How long does that take you? You might as well just render and denoise afterwards.
https://www.deviantart.com/mcasual/art/mcjDenoise-for-Daz-Studio-Intel-Open-Denoise-A-I-802853982
I run the scene optimizer once for each of my characters and then save that character in a scene-subset for future use. So It takes a couple of minutes to run the optimizer and I only need to do it once even though my character may appear in many scenes (I usually do upwards of 50 scenes for each of my hobby projects - sort of like a picture story).
As for the denoiser - I have yet to find one that retains any semblance of quality in the fine details. The built-in IRay denoiser is particularly poor but I tried the Intel one and was not happy with that either. I'm told that the Cycles denoiser is much better but I am not there yet with the process of exporting and rendering in Blender. I am looking at that as an alternative though.