GPU Graphics Card Blues…
VitalBodies
Posts: 161
In the event one can not get enough RTX 3000 series cards...
What other cards are available that accelerate DazStudio iRay?
Entry level and midrange and high end.
Example: my Nvidia GTX 760 4GB is said to not be supported to accerate rendering.
How does one know what cards do and how much they do?
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Comments
What version of DS are you using? That determines which version of Iray you're using, which in turn determines which GPUs are supported.
I just recieved my new HP Omen desktop with a 3090. It is astonishingly fast. What took 2 hours CPU rendering on a top of the line Mac (nowhere near convergence) takes minutes.
It took about a month to get it shipped and it's not cheap but so far (2 weeks in) I have no complaints once I tweaked my Daz settings.
Yes, I could have built my own box for less money but getting a card is nearly impossible. This was easy if something of a premium.
They several options to choose from. Just remember to get memory that is 2x the amount of GPU memory (so if you have 8G then have 16G of RAM).
These will support the latest Daz versions.
Not your cheapest option but I chose cost over having to order, return, order return, guess, etc. That's worth a few hundred bucks to me.
Using the latest version DazStudio on Win 10. I have a Ryzen 5900x processor.
I have been using a Ryzen 5900x processors and various graphics cards mostly (2008-2013] old. I also was using a RTX 3080 with 16gb ram.
I have more than one computer so looking for less expensive cards also. Interesting to note how much ram is suggested vs GPU memory.
I agree, the RTX 3080 is fast. The 3080 Ti is said to be faster than the 3090 but have not tried one.
You could investigate the MSI GTX 1650 4GB. I use it. It's moderately priced around $260 and handles simple DAZ scenes promptly and effectively. Character- and prop-rich scenes will take longer, sometimes much longer. Its drivers come optimized for either gaming or studio, which is meant for static graphics, and updating them is a breeze. Then there's the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12GB. It's twice the price, which arguably makes it entry-level RTX. I've no experience with it, but the specs look great.
Can the 1650 still be found at that price? If so where? Same with the 3060?
I have heard your scene needs to fit within the GPU memory to be fast.
Thus big scenes require more memory.
I am not sure how to tell what size my scene is or if it fits?
3060 and 2060 still seem to be available in pre-built systems at a reasonable price. (NOT the very big sellers like Dell or HP!)
That's probably still the best way of getting a 3060, they have not had a problem with availability throughout this period.
Thanks. Are there any you would suggest?
It hard to recommend one in particular, it depends where you are in the world.
Hi VitalBodies.
Try Amazon for both the MSI GTX 1650 and the RTX 3060. Also look for your local clone shops. Further, MSI has a web site; when you locate the card, the web site should offer links to sales outlets. You can also google the card and see what comes up. As for file size, compose your DAZ scene and save it, then navigate to the saved file in Windows Explorer. Select/highlight it, right click, and select Properties. That should display the file size.
Ugh, totally nuts. All the 3060 listed round here at amazon ar over a grand. About how much I paid for my 2080 super........
I am in the USA. I have found pretty much what you said, you have to buy a system to get a card.
Crazy! My file size is about 2MB! Maybe I need two 3090s to handle that, LOL.
I have tried Amazon and eBay, Bestbuy and others. Prices are high.
Totally nuts says it well!
...in the same boat as the OP.
I have a Maxwell Titan-X but in some scenes it renders almost as slow in Daz 4.12.0,47, as if I were in CPU mode which I discovered was due to the version of Iray adopted in 4.12 which permanently switches OptiX on for non RTX GPUs. The scene I've been struggling with is a dimly lit one with in G3F character a couple small props and 8 mostly low intensity emissive lights and one Photometric light I removed parts of the set (some with the Geometry editor as the walls and floor were each one continuous mesh) that didn't have an effect on the scene, but that barely made a dent in the render time. At 3 hours, and just over 18,000 samples the scene was only 61% converged and still had a reasonable amount of noise. A couple years I rendered a similarly dark scene at a larger size that had 19 emissive lights which rendered on around 4 hours. My estimate was had I allowed it to continue (I would have also needed to bump the samples to about 28,000) it would have taken at least 5 hours, possibly more, to complete.
I have MSI Afterburner and the scene was well within the limits of VRAM and system memory so that is not the cause.
I also was not using the noise filters as I know those do increase render time.
After receiving feedback on a thread I started here as to possible reasons, I did some research on the release notes for 4.12 as well as notes including release notes on Nvidia's site that is when i discovered the OptiX was permanently enabled for older GPUs in the Iray build used in 4.12 which was also when RTX cards were first supported.
Based on that I rolled back the driver and opened the scene in Daz 4.10 (which predates RTX) made sure OptiX was disabled and ran another test which took half the time as noted above to reach 67% completion on the default setting of 15,000 samples. The bother is I need to keep switching drivers to go back & forth between 4.12 and 4.10.to ensure OptiX is turned off for rendering. Just staying on 4.10 means some tools I use would be unavailable (for example not sure what would happen if I attempted to open a scene with say dForce clothing in the older version).
Like the OP and others I cannot afford an RTX card and will not step backwards in VRAM as I like to do fairly involved scenes. A 3060 would be the bottom line as it is has about the same specs and performance as the Titan-X (though with a faster processor, faster memory, and RTX cores). But as RL_Media mentions, the prices are still stupid expensive upwards of 2-½x to 3x the normal price. Not going to buy a prebuild as I already have two systems (both homebuilts) and the cost would be more than just paying the scalper price (the cheapest systems with a 3060 I can find are around 1,200$ and that's with a paltry 8 GB of system memory).
The file size of a saved scene has nothing to do with how large the scene is and how much RAM and VRAM it reserves when opened.
Low light and iRay, that seems to be a challenging trick to perform without grainy long renders. I started experimenting with the dynamic between camera setting in "tone mapping" and the environment settings including intensity and the dome settings. It is an interesting balance. I found so far that if I can light my scene just barely below what I am after with the camera and environmental settings only and with NO lights, then I can add lights for effect rather than hoping the power the whole render.
This has helped with grainy renders for me so far. I am not familiar with each version of DS to know if this might apply to your goals.
That's what I would have guessed. Still wondering how to know?
...attached are the two scenes i mentioned:. The first is the one with the 19 emissive lights (5 lanterns , 13 firefly insects, and a ghost light for the moonlight) That was the one rendered in CPU mode in around 4 hours.
The second is the one has been giving me all sorts of fits even though it has less than half the Emissive lights, and as I mentioned, most of the set that didn't affect the scene removed. The attached image is the one I rendered in 4.10 instead of 4.12 where it seemed as slow as CPU mode even though it was rendering on a GPU with 12 GB VRAM and over 3,000 cores.
Without opening the scene and looking at how much memory it reserves...
If the size of the installation file is way bigger than others of the same type (for example a pair of boots having 700MB installation file...)
The resolution of the textures and maps, if something the size of fingernail has 8192x8192px textures, it isn't very well done
When you have opened a scene and it makes your computer feel unusually sluggish...
When you try to render a scene, the log can tell you how much VRAM it uses, but the OS, DS, the base load of the scene and the work space IRAY needs, eat up around 2.5-3.5GB's to start with, so with 8GB VRAM your geometry and textures combined must be kept under 5GB's to render with the GPU.
Edit; Forgot, a scenefile may be just links to your installed products, therefore it can be small, but the scene it openes may be gigabytes in size.
Mesh lights can make a scene unrenderable, and as far as I have understood, it is because every quad of the mesh is is treated as one light source - if the mesh has 100 quads, that's 100 lights, even though the user sees it as only one.
...you sure? I thought it was only each total surface.
Certainly not going back to what was done in 3DL having to place photometric point and spot lights by all the light sources as that does not produce realistic lighting quality. For example how would I make the bulbs in the two red lights "glow" without turning them into emissive objects? In 3DL it just requires adjusting the Ambient Channel but there is no Ambient Channel in Iray.
However that still does not explain why rolling back from 4.12 (which has the RTX version of Iray with OptiX always on) to 4.10 (with the pre-RTX version of Iray) would cut the rendering time by slightly more than half unless OptiX is the main reason for the extreme slowdown. I expect such a simly lit scene to take longer than an exterior daylight one, but not at almost on the scale of CPU mode particularly with a fairly powerful GPU.
Unfortunately the original version of the other scene was lost in a drive crash so it is no longer available to view mode to Wire Texture Shaded mode to check out the firefly meshes.
Bugger had another server crash while entering this. Daz needs to deal with that issue as it's getting rather frustrating.
I'm pretty sure.
I myself stumbled on the problem with a city scene that I had trouble understanding why it was falling back to CPU, even when I had reduced the textures and hidden/removed things behind the camera and the culprit turned out to be the meshlights in the windows (lots of them).
I remember reading about it also here.
Maybe create a low res primitive ball, cube or plane inside the light source to reduce the number of quads set as emissive.
...a good idea however the light's mesh needs a transparent lens to place the emitter behind..
I do have the IES Master which includes a disc and rectangle emitter. I used the disk emitter in the two floodlights above the door and light shining from the drone on the card lock. There are also two rectangular mesh lights on the sides out of the view plane of the camera which are a single polygon each, another disk emitter in the keycard Leela is holding with an effect texture, and a tiny mesh light on the drone.
As to the bulbs in the cage lights, they have quite a few polys (tris) but I don't have the modelling skill to make low poly substitutes and just placing a sphere there wouldn't look right..The bulbs in the set are also not transparent.
Again if the scene would render in the same amount of time as it does in 4.10, I'd be fine, but this forcing OptiX on pre RTX GPUs in 4.12 and above seems to be having the opposite results than intended as it seems to cause Iray to error check after each iteration.
I wonder if the second rendering is cutoff from the "environment" dome and thus the lighting might be more challenging?
Thanks. I will try to check the log and see what it says. So far my scenes are extremely minimalist.
...in both cases I set it to "Scene Only" as using the environment dome floods the scene with light unwanted that ruins the effect (same as an HDR). Again, I am aware such a scene would take longer with, but before dropping back to Daz 4.10 the render time was ridiculous, which again points to the fact that OptiX being forced on older GPU cards is likely the reason for the extreme render time seen in 4.12.
I also removed the ceiling the scene. For the side walls and floor behind the camera, I used the Geometry Editor and reduced opacity to Zero to reduce ray bounces as none directly affect the scene. The only way to actually remove the wall and floor meshes out of the camera view would require doing so in a modelling programme which is beyond my expertise.
'The only way to actually remove the wall and floor meshes out of the camera view would require doing so in a modelling programme which is beyond my expertise.'
You don't need a modelling programe for that it's very easy to do with the Geometry Editor. Just select all the parts you want removed, right click, select Geometry Editing > Delete Selected Polygon(s), and confirm in the Alert box. It's not undoable so make sure you have a saved copy of your scene.
To see how much memory your scene is using use GPU-Z https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/ , it shows you both System and graphic card memory use.
...I just assigned each section I selected to a new name ("Right Wall Rear", "Left Wall Rear" and "Floor Rear") then set the opacity to zero for each. I wasn't aware that they could actually be permanently deleted from the scene.
I just opened the scene and selected one of the sections again with the editor then clicked on "Geometry Editing, but the only delete options I see are for "Hidden Polygons" and "Unused Vertices". not "Selected Polygons". Is this a function that was added in a later version of the programme?
What version of Studio are you using? Though I think the option to delete polys has always been there. But I think they have moved it around in the menus in diffrant versions.