Do I need a super computer for DS?
I am a DS noob for all intensive purposes.
1.I've slowly learned a little more about finding stuff I installed And installing stuff manually.
2. I'm slowly learning a little more about lighting and render settings.
Still sometimes I look for stuff for 10-20 min. Some items will have say the hair object/actor in one place and the mat maps in another. (Some don't , and I'm even talking about something that comes w/ the original product.) And some items I use the search for and it finds it, others it don't and later I just happen to find it while looking for something else. Then I try using diff light sets and wierd things happen.. and the render takes forever. I even lowered the size to like 500x500 just to get a quicker preview. And still.... Forever. Sigh. It always tries to lock up my computer. If I can get it to work at all (open my browser in the background) , it is very slow often tries to lock up my computer. It did just that the other night.. Complete lock up. Had to hit CTRL ALT Delete.. and it barely came up after several tries. I nearly had to hit the power button. I'm not sure how I saw it but once recently when I was using it, DS said something like : Rendering 292 objects? All I had in the Window was G8 F w/ hair and a decent texture map. Had a close up for her face and she was naked. lol. Also I went and deleted some lights in the node from some of the sets. Nothing seems to help. To say the least it's discouraging After looking for stuff for 20 min, getting lights set, ect... the computer being super slow or freezing. I can't figure out what is going wrong? Why this is happening?
Thanks!
I use to use Poser, Bryce, C4d, and Photoshop. Sometimes renders took a bit but they didn't do to my pc what DS is doing and that was 15 yrs ago. A lot less powerfull PC.
I am attaching a SS of my specs
Also my Graphics card is NVidiaGeForce GT 730 (I know it's not the greatest but my old computers had onboard graphics. lol) There is a Card shortage atm too. :-(
Comments
You need a fairly good gaming PC with an nvidia GPU. Those specs are pretty low for any type of quality rendering in iray. The CPU might be ok if you had a really high end nvidia GPU, I am even surprised the one you have works. You will also need to increase your ram since 8 gb is very low, 16 would be the minimum with 32 being ideal
as for finding your content, learn the file structure when installed so that inside DS you can use the content library and go right to it. I wouldn't rely on or even use smart content or connect, only install manually or use DIM.
tech has changed DRASTICALLY in 15 years. I have swapped PCs 4 times in 15 years
The first thing that jumps out of your list is the 8GB RAM, that's the reason why your computer is sluggish and locks up because you are using your harddrive as memory.
I would consider 32GB's the minimum for up to date DS and you would need more if you wanted to do Iray rendering, as your Nvidia card is probably not supported anymore for Iray and the amount of VRAM would be too small even if it was.
You don't need a super computer. All you need is enough RAM and a supported Nvidia GPU with min. 6GB's of VRAM
Wow.. My computer is 3 yrs old But bought as a gaming computer (IBuyPower)and it works fine for World of Warcraft as well as other games. They don't lag or freeze. My daughter came over last week and used my computer for a android html coding program for a class she has. She couldn't even get it to run on like 3 other computers but she got it going on mine.
Yeah my Card does need an upgrade but like I said there is a shortage atm. They (IBuyPower guy) told me the largest one I can put in here is a 1050 w/ my set up. They only people that even have them are so high I won't pay that. By the time I paid what they want I would most likely be better off buying a new PC.
I think it's a conspiricy! The programmers and software people got together w/ the PC companies and said:
Let's make it to where they have to buy new parts and computers more often! LOL..
Thanks y'all!
You can get back at the software companies by not updating the software, just the hardware
LOL. I wish I still had my old computer. I have disk for a couple of programs I use to use. I'd install those programs and maybe make some Backgrounds and or characters to bring into DS via a flash drive on this new computer. I have a Ton of V3 stuff, Resources to make things myself, props, animals, ect...
Content management in DS is an incoherent mess. Everybody has their own way of dealing with it.
I make custom cathegories. It means that I have to cathegorise everything I install manually, which is tedious. But then at least I know how to find things afterwards.
http://stonefeather.co/tutorial-1
It's actually the crypto currency craze that is causing the shortage. The miners use bots to buy up all the high end cards to create mining servers for the crypto crap.
I've revisited Poser and happy to say it runs like Butter!
I have been using DS for almost 6 years now. Up through Generation 7 (Genesis 3), you could do fairly well with a laptop (gaming laptop even more so). Generation 8 and the DS updates and the Nvidia updates have combined to make a hefty computer almost a requirement ... and it may have gotten a little worse with 8,1. IF I need the realism, I will use Gen 8, but I prefer to work with Gen 7 and below as it is much faster and easier.
True, but there are many, many other limitations from keepong me going back to it, the main one not being able to use the current figures
Not sure what the "other games" that you have are, but with WoW one of their design philosophies was to make the game accessible to as many people as possible for max profit. So it doesn't need top of the line or current hardware to be able to run or look good. WoW might not be a good benchmark for figuring out what other graphics intensive programs you can run. What other games do you have? something that has nice and detailed graphics and was released recently?
3 years in computer age is also comparable to couple of decades in human life, 3-4 decades if talking about GPU's
Well I gave up on Studio in mid September. I do love Poser but was kinda depressed because I had bought all this DS stuff Gen 8 stuff. After much looking and looking again (was constantly out of stock at my job, Walmart) . And 3rd party sellers buying and Jacking up the price 300-500$. Finally got a PC that should handle it! Setting everything up Now. I'll keep y'all posted. The CPU and Graphics card alone cost more than I paid for the entire PC.
https://rog.asus.com/us/desktops/mid-tower/rog-strix-g10dk-series/spec
I got the one on the right (with the 3060 GPU) for $999.99..
I'm excited!
I hope it works out for you! It might be worth investing in more memory, as the specs say that the "ROG Strix G10DK G10DK-WB764" only comes with 8GB of RAM. It helps to have 32 or 64 GB (which that motherboard will support). Thankfully memory prices are not as insane as GPU prices!
Agreed, IMHO you will want to add more RAM to your PC or you will have similar issues to the previous PC (not as bad thanks to the ssd, but still very slow when preparing to render and sluggish while rendering). DS needs to be able to have two copies of the scene loaded in RAM to render with Iray. One is the native DS scene, the other is the Iray version (note that the DS version of the scene can easily exceed the Iray version for system RAM consumption though). The general rule of thumb is to have a minimum of 2x your GPU memory in system RAM. I have an 8Gb GPU and have used close to 32 gb RAM for some scenes. You should have at least 16Gb to have a good user experience, 24 or 32 would be better.
Otherwise, congrats on your new PC!