is it normal for daz to use up most of my memory?

Upirium

I'm rendering rn and my memory is like 92% used. albiet i have some other stuff open. i have 32gb of RAM (i'm at max capacity without changing my whole motherboard)

if it does use so much memory what kind of gpu do you need to be able to render? I think I'm looking at 3060 with 12gb of RAM. I don't think I'm going to get any higher than that...

pic of my task manager for reference

ramon73

If the iRay render exceeds your VRAM then it will use the CPU. I personally use a RTX3070 graphics card with 8GB VRAM and with a simple decorated scene it already uses most of the VRAM. Even with 12GB VRAM you will still reach the limit if the scene you render is a bit complex, but it's abiviously better than 8GB.

prixat

The amount of main memory DS uses has little to no relation to the amount a GPU will use.

Havos

The amount of memory used will vary a lot depending on your scene. If you are using dForce hair, this will use a very large amount of memory. Also each Genesis 1-8 character can use anywhere from 200MB up to 2-3GB each, depending on the textures, clothing, Sub-D value, and the amount of morphs available to that figure. Some background scenes are also resource hogs, and will use up memory, particularly ones with many different texture files.

As mentioned above the amount of RAM consumed is not really useful for determining how much VRAM is needed on the GPU, but typically you need a lot more RAM than VRAM, on average 2-3 times, but as stated above this will vary depending on the scene. Whilst dForce hair will eat huge amounts of RAM, they often have no texture files, and despite the heavy geometry, they can be relatively light on VRAM usage.