SOLVED Does Studio by Any Other CPU Run as Slowly?

xyer0

My Daz Studio 4.15, when executing commands, often whites out the viewport and gives me a spinning blue wheel. This is mostly with heavy scenes (or with smoothing turned on), but I've noticed this phenomenon occurring recently with only a single character loaded. I remember reading someone on the forum saying that they thought they needed a faster computer. So, they splurged and got the fastest CPU they could, but they still had slowness. I haven't noticed this happening with tutorials I've seen.

TLDR: Will a state-of-the-art CPU make Daz Studio run without repeated lags?

JeniMorris

I have a "state of the art" CPU with a NVIDA GeForce RTX 3090 and I have no problems rendering at all or with any lagging. It was worth every penny I spent ;-)

 

TheKD

I haven't really tested out on a full scene yet, but I just upgraded to a 3900x. It is faster both single core and has double the cores of my 2600x. I just cranked a G8 girl up to 5 subd, and posing her with the sliders is actually real time. Before I used to get stutters and jerky sliders, made fine tuning the pose a real pain. Not sure if it was just the new CPU, or the newer and higher number motherboard is also helping.

LeatherGryphon

A lot of missing information.  Mac or PC?  Laptop or desktop?  How old is the computer?  How much RAM memory?  What kind of graphics processor (i.e. onboard or via graphics card)?  If graphics card, then which model?  How much VideoRAM on graphics card?  Which operating system version?  Which type of storage drives (i.e. HD or SSD)?  If HD then which rotation rate (5400 or 7200 RPM)?  Does the moon appear in your sky now and then?  Does the ocean near you always come right up to the shore?  Enquiring people want to know.

LeatherGryphon

Newer CPUs help, but modern DAZ Studio products require a lot of RAM and graphics horsepower.  Anything you do using IRay rendering much works faster if you have a hefty graphics card built around an Nvidia GTX or RTX GPU chip, and at least 6GB VideoRAM, like a GTX-1660.  But an RTX card with 8GB is hot stuff, and  an RTX card with 12GB is cooking with gas!  But good luck finding an Nvidia technology graphics card, anywhere, at any price. (Except in a pre-built system, but even they are rare right now.)   But if your graphics card doesn't have enough VRAM the job is shipped back to the CPU to do the IRay rendering and slows down massively.  That's where the state-of-the-art CPU comes in.  I don't know AMD products, but in the Intel world you should have at least a modern (generation 8, 9, or 10) Core-i5, i7 or i9 CPU* with a basic clock speed of at least near 3GHz and preferably with a "Turbo" speed above 4GHz).  DAZ Studio on Windows10 should have at least 16GB of RAM (32GB is better for big scenes with lots of high resolution textures).  Whatever the CPU, having your operating system and data storage on a modern quality Solid-State Drive (SSD) is heads and shoulders better than using a spinning Hard Drive (HD).  Your SSD should be at least 500GB but 1TB is better, not just because of more storage but because SSDs have limited number of write cycles.  The drive evens out the "wear" on the storage cells but having more free space on the SSD reduces the average "wear" and the drive will last longer before having to start retiring cells.

Buying or assembling a state-of-the-art computer requires doing your homework and understanding what you're getting.

*Note:  Intel CPU model numbers have the generation number as the first number(s) in the complete model number.  For example, an Intel "Core i7-10700" is an "i7" design, generation 10, feature set 700.  Where "feature set" is things like whether or not it is overclockable, or if it has built-in graphic handling capability, power requirements, clock speeds, etc.  Wikipedia has a good article about Intel CPU models.  Here' are the lists for i5 and i7 processor  models  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i5_processors  ;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_processors

Sevrin

The slowing down is something that happens with certain items like hairs, poses with expressions, and actions like zeroing or loading characters.  I'm pretty sure the number of morphs installed has such a large impact that even big hardware improvements can't mitigate it.  

It's just the DLP (Daz Loyalty Penalty).

xyer0

@JeniMorris, @TheKD, @LeatherGryphon, @Sevrin Thanks for the responses. And you answered my question. The problem is not with rendering, which is why I asked about the CPU, but with lags after executing commands. I know its time to upgrade. I just wanted to be sure that I would see improvements.

TheKD

New experiment, keep adding G8's until I start seeing camera or pose lag like I used to, or DS crashes. This many so far, camera is moving real time, pose sliders are real time. I am surprised as hell. Before I would start seeing lag with just 2 or 3 people.

xyer0

That's great, The KD! Thanks for sharing.

droidy001

If it helps I get lag and occasional white out after executing commands. White outs seem to occur more if I try doing something while the program is working on something else. A sort of "don't touch that, I'm busy" warning. That's with a ryzen 2600 32gb ram @3000mhz and a titan x. Daz is on an nvme but asests of a spinning drive. Although I have to say, the increase from 16gb to 32gb didn't half make a difference when navigating a large scene.

xyer0

Thanks, @droidy001, I guess I'll be going for at least 128gb of RAM then, because I'm done twiddling my thumbs waiting for anything but renders.

droidy001

The ram didn't seem to affect load times, just the general snappyness of the scene once loaded. It reduced stuttering when moving around the viewport and moving objects around. Certainly made setting up a scene a lot better experience. I find the tasks that create the most lag are loading scenes and applying make up.

Sevrin

You might also want to watch out for browser windows in the background, especially with YouTube or something like that open.  Chrome in particular is a memory hog and keeps busy doing who knows what.

Taoz

Camera Headlamp (which seem to be hardcoded in Perspective View) can really slow viewport navigation down if your system already is slow.  I always create a camera with Headlamp off as one of the first things, and use that.

Also, large backdrop images can slow Iray updating considerably down in later versions of DS, they didn't affect it at all before.

PerttiA

droidy001 said:

The ram didn't seem to affect load times, just the general snappyness of the scene once loaded. It reduced stuttering when moving around the viewport and moving objects around. Certainly made setting up a scene a lot better experience. I find the tasks that create the most lag are loading scenes and applying make up.

Attached is a test that I did to see how much RAM and VRAM was used and how the usage increased.

A) was a single G8 figure with clothing and hair
B-D) was 4 G8 figures with clothing and hair in an indoor scene, used the SubD to increase VRAM load.

Lighting with 3 spotlights and the used clothing, hair and scene were lightweight
System W7, I7-5820K, 64GB RAM, RTX 2070 Super, DS 4.15.0.2

On W10 the VRAM usage would have been 800MB's more

You can see that even in B), rendering already eats up 32.5GB's of RAM even when doing the actual rendering on GPU and I could see a definite change in responsiveness when I moved from 32GB's to 64GB's RAM

xyer0

Thanks Sevrin & Taoz for the heads up! I only connect my Daz computer to the internet when I'm downloading from DIM, and I exit Daz Studio (using Task Manager) BEFORE I turn on the internet. I have a Headlamp Blocker that I use instead of headlamps in Texture Shaded, but I mostly use Filament [whenever possible] for my Viewport. I'll be mindful of the backdrops.

Taoz

xyer0 said:

Thanks Sevrin & Taoz for the heads up! I only connect my Daz computer to the internet when I'm downloading from DIM, and I exit Daz Studio (using Task Manager) BEFORE I turn on the internet. I have a Headlamp Blocker that I use instead of headlamps in Texture Shaded, but I mostly use Filament [whenever possible] for my Viewport. I'll be mindful of the backdrops.

Guess I should point out that it's the built-in Backdrop in DS (on the Environment tab) that I'm talking about, not backdrops in general (I'm not sure if/how they affect Iray update speed).

xyer0

Taoz said:

xyer0 said:

Thanks Sevrin & Taoz for the heads up! I only connect my Daz computer to the internet when I'm downloading from DIM, and I exit Daz Studio (using Task Manager) BEFORE I turn on the internet. I have a Headlamp Blocker that I use instead of headlamps in Texture Shaded, but I mostly use Filament [whenever possible] for my Viewport. I'll be mindful of the backdrops.

Guess I should point out that it's the built-in Backdrop in DS (on the Environment tab) that I'm talking about, not backdrops in general (I'm not sure if/how they affect Iray update speed).

Ah so desu ka