Rendering Speed in DS 4.12 compared to DS4.14
kwannie
Posts: 869
So this is kinda weird, I had started rendering in 3DL because I wanted to use some older products that are 3DL only, and noticed I could actually add more characters to the scene without a significant loss rendering speed. I using DS 4.12 and getting about 12 seconds per frame, until yesterday. Suddenly loaded up a saved scene and went to render and now it was taking about a minute and 40 seconds per frame. Tried reloading metadata because that helps sometimes and still rendering slow. Decided to let DS 4.14 have a crack at it, and Baam!! Like lightning, same scene saved in My Library and now I am getting about 9 seconds per frame. What the..............!!! So I am wondering why DS 4.14 is doing it so much faster, and would DS 4.15 be even faster than that? I have heard DS 4.15 is have a few issues not loading stuff. Any ideas???
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I could be wrong about this, I had a problem with Daz being bogged down and it turned to be a simple fix of deleting what I think was called cache/temp files. At the time for me it was cache, unfortunately I don't remember how to delete them, but maybe someone here can tell you. Then you can render happily in Daz 4.12 again.
I'm wondering if using both DS 4.12 and DS 4.14 on the same computer would both use the same cache files. If so, why would DS 4.14 render so much faster and not get bogged down. Does anybody know ifthere would possibly be a rendering speed difference using DS 4.15 with my I7 8700, GTX1080, 32 GB system ram?
I use 4.11 and 4.15 on the same machine. 4.11 works better with my machine's card, and has a less memory intensive version of Iray. I use this primarily. 4.15 I can usually get one render out of, before subsequent renders drop to CPU, making my renders become very slow.
I have noticed the same... With 4.12.0.86 i could do several subsequent renders, could even leave 3-4 previous renders open to see the effect of changes and never drop to CPU, but with 4.15 the fourth or fifth subsequent render will drop to CPU due to lack of available VRAM even when there are no previous render windows open.
Did you update the NVIDIA driver to make the 4.14 or 4.15 work? .. if so those update gpu drivers have the opitex prime acceleration always on and would greatly effect how your daz 4.12 will run. not all drivers are created equal . The best driver for daz studio 4.12.0.86 is gpu driver 436.30 4.14 requIre the nestest driver even if your using 3dl some reason the drivers effect how which daz studio version renders & runs I learned this the hard way after trying 4.14 to try filement & rlled back to daz 4.12. & the gpu drivers. Thats the only reason I'm not planning upgrading my daz studio anymore until my GTX 1080ti's gpu's are dead and I need upgrade to rtx
I did update the driver for 4.14 and used the nvidia driver that is supposed to geared towards rendering seems like the driver was called "studio ....something" I don't remember. Ivy what are your thoughts on the 3000 series nvidia cards? Since you are one of the only true DAZ animators I know, your instict is golden. Do you ever use 3Delight anymore? The CPU is the rendering engine for 3Delight, so now I'm looking to get a better CPU.
I would love a RTX 3090 24 gig card but unfortunately its way out of my price range. my 2 1080ti new didn't cost as much as one RTX 3090
But if I could afford one or 2 I would most definitely would use them for animation. my opinon is they would be a real asset for animation. But as of now my 2 GTX 1080ti's are 11.5 gigs each & still working great Plus I paid $800 each for them new 2 years ago, so I'm not ready to let them go & I am in no hurry to upgrade my daz studio when what I have is working for my needs . and yes 4.12 in iray can get 12 seconds a frame because that is what I get as well with my gtx 1080's
If NVIDIA did not change the architecture of the GPU driver so Opitex prime is always on I may have moved to daz 4.14 and 4.15 The GPU drivers above 438.70 all have opitex prime on by default with no one way to turn it off. It sucks the vram out of the GTX gpus making them pretty much slow as molasses on a cold winters day. for rendering iray in daz studio. & that is only because opitex prime accelerations always on to make up for the Raytrace that the The RTX gpu's have natively
That is the throne in my foot that keeps me using 4.12.0.86 and driver 436.30
...interesting, I'm using the 4.12.0.47 Beta with the latest Nvida driver (461.09) and even after doing upwards of a dozen test renders, never had it drop to the CPU (I don't use Iray View Mode as the refresh rate is too sluggish compared to Texture Shaded mode). My system has a Maxwell Titan X which is a generation behind the 1080 Ti, which has 1 GB more VRAM than the Ti but 500 fewer cores running on W7 Pro 64. .
I've stayed with this particular Beta as it has been extremely stable compared to the later General releases (based on what I have read here in the forums) and not as buggy as 4.15 appears to be.
I believe your using 3 maybe 4 releases previous to the 4.12.0.85 beta that I am using, I also using 4.12.0.86 public build, So its possible that version of daz is not effected by the opitex prime change in the gpu driver. because you can still check or uncheck the opitex acceleration off/on under the render setting. my 4.11 is not effected by the opitex prime driver change either . But my understanding is as a rule NVIDIA who updates these gpu driver dictates the control on the opitex prime acceleration in daz.studio which from what I read in other post the new drivers all have opitex prime enabled by default with no way to turn it off and has been my experiences as well
plus I am tired of installing new versions studio to only have to reinstall my older version.
...yeah I ran a test with and without Opitex and the render times were pretty much the same.
Now go try rendering daz 4.15 in iRAY with a GTX gpu . Opitex prime acceleration is on by default , you'll notice a huge difference
...don't have 4.15 installed as from what I've been reading, it's a bit buggy.
Yea I've been reading about the problems people have been dealing with. I wonder how much is the user and how much is the app though. I would like to try to use Filament. But not at the expense of making my GTX gpu's becoming a preverbal brick
...yeah I have no use for the filament render engine as I only do single frame illustrations and it's viewport based only. Does it use the GPU?
I've usually held back on releases of new versions because of bugs and instabilities. The first 4.12 General Release had serious issues so they resumed the Beta track. Same for version 4.14. Now it appears there's a new Public Beta (4.15.0.9). that supersedes the General Release 4.15 .0.2 .
After 4,12.0.47 I fell out of the beta track because I was having serious issues with the Install Manager which caused me to resort to manual downloads for a good part of last year Hence I missed a lot of development. I've never seen a Beta or General release as stable as the one I've been using.
Daz crashed for me a few days ago - but software does on occasions; I've been using it with multiple instances running, both .02 and .09, without issues bar that one crash.
A question for you all:
I have an Asus ROG G752VY laptop with an Nvidia GTX 980M. I bought this when Iray first came out just so I could use Iray. Right now I am using DAZ Studio version 4.12.1.117 and everything works well for me.
I too cannot justify spending the money to upgrade to a new PC with an RTX. They are SUPER expensive.
My question to you all:
Is there any point to upgrading to DS 4.14 ? Will Filament even work with my Nvidia GTX 980M? Is there any advantage? Would I see any increase in render speeds?
Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
DarkElf, I'm sorry that I did see your post. I am definately not an expert on the matter but I don't think filament requires a high performance GPU. I have gotten faster renders in DS 4.14 but it does like to crash on occasion.
I have 4.15 and GTX 1080tis, so I have done it.
I have experienced seemingly random crashes when starting a render. But this issue started with 4.14 for me, not 4.15. I can go potentially go many renders without a crash, but then I might only do a few renders and get a crash, it doesn't seem to be consistent, and it doesn't matter if my scenes are late or small. Again this crash is when starting a render. I believe it is the Iray plugin itself.
I simply make habit to save my scene before rendering, if I have made some changes and don't want to risk it. This is a good habit to keep regardless.
For me, the speed improvement with 4.14 and 4.15 is well worth putting up with this annoyance. 4.15 is the same speed as 4.14, so speedwise there is no reason to upgrade. But if you are using Genesis 8.1, you will need 4.15 for the new skin shaded. 4.15 is also needed to load your 8.0 morphs for 8.1. If you use 4.14 to load G8.1, which I have tested, 8.1 will not have any access to your 8.0 morphs collection.
If you don't plan on using 8.1, then you don't need 4.15. You can even use several 8.1 features on your 8.0 characters while running 4.14 or below. I've done it. You can change the scene ID info on the 8.1 tear and eyelashes and save them as new 8.0 props. They will work perfectly.
I don't see much advantage to filament personally. The newer studios are more memory intensive and require more card memory and include newer versions of iray which also require more memory. plus you will need to update your drivers.
of course you can just test it and see. Back up your drivers and studio installers and run the installer.
Kwannie, Outrider42 and Serene Night ... thank you very much for taking to time to give me your feedback. Your insight is greatly appreciated.
I think I will wait on upgrading my DS.
I don't think the new versions of Daz are specifically more memory intensive. While it is true that some things do use more memory, a lot of the memory creep is just from the quality of products getting released. You have to consider that every new surface you add will also add more to the memory footprint. And Daz has added all sorts of new surfaces to play with. Back in the day, many characters just had a bump, normal, and color maps, and maybe a gloss map. The trans map was the same as the color map, too. Today you not only will find a variety of textures used in the surfaces, but more different surface settings in use. And then you add more characters are set to higher subdivision levels, that alone uses a chunk of memory.
If I go back to my older Genesis 2 models, they don't really take up much more memory in Daz 4.15 than they did back in 4.8. They even load faster. But loading a Genesis 8 bumps up the memory.
You don't have to upgrade, you can download the beta and test it out instead if you are concerned. The beta installs in a separate location and will not overwrite your main Daz. You can even have both open at the same time. The beta can use all the same files, and you can save and load files across each version, assuming you don't save a scene with a feature the old version lacks. Like you cannot load a character with the new Iray PBR Skin shader in 4.12, you will get errors and the surfaces will not load correctly.
So don't be afraid to try the beta out.
Thanks for these thought Outrider42.
Good points about the memory issues.
I was unaware that the newer version of DS would not overwrite the older one. Sounds like a good idea to try it out and see if my machine can handle it even though I don't have the RTX. Sounds like the worse that could happen is it just doesn't work, right?
Hmmmm. Now you've got me thinking again.
...wait ,5.15 doesn't overwrite older ones?
So Outrider42 says Kyoto Kid.
I seem to remember from past installs that DS DID make duplicate installs when I installed a newer version. That seems familiar to me.
But my memory is a bit hazy on that so I will let those who know for sure tell you.
I think outrider42 was pretty clear when saying: The beta installs in a separate location and will not overwrite your main Daz.
Of course the new general release will overwrite the older one.
...installing 4.7 to is how I lost 4.6 which likethe current 4.12 beta I'm using, ran just fine.
You can have 1 beta and 1 main version of Daz installed without any issue. If you already have a beta, then installing a new beta may indeed overwrite the old beta.
You can get around this by moving the locations around and making sure that the option to "remove previous installation" (or however it is worded) is disabled in DIM. I made the mistake of not realizing that this was on and lost a beta that way.
If you are really, worried (and that is understandable) you can have your Daz install on an external drive. Just unplug the drive before installing a new Daz. It can't delete anything if it has no access to them.
I just built a new computer. I can run all of my old Daz installs without actually installing anything. They do treat me like I am logging in for the first time, but the stuff is there. The catch is that some plugins may not behave right. It is strange, because I cannot get mesh grabber to install on the Daz I actually installed on my new PC, right on the new OS drive. But Mesh Grabber works totally fine in the old install of Daz on my former primary drive. All I did was point it to where my content library was and boom, it worked perfectly fine. So I am using the install I had before building my new computer.
So anyway, I now have a version of 4.14, 4.12, 4.11, and 4.15 all in either beta or full release. I had a version of 4.10 that I lost.
...the "less buggy" version of 4.15 is the latest beta, however that would overwrite the 4.12 beta I am currently using. The only external I have is my backup and not going to use that. Also I have a GTX not an RTX GPU which would suffer somewhat as it would be forced to run with Optitex on which uses more VRAM.
Getting back into the swing of actually creating full scenes again (not just character [re]development) so the last thing I need is added frustration.
Crashes can also be caused by occasional RAM errors, especially with overclocked RAM. DDR5 has ECC which prevents these, you just need an AMD board with ECC enabled to utilize it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPeCNrNTr3k