With 2 graphic cards... & about render farms.

Ukyuu

Greetings, I was wondering how the DAZ will behave if I have a 1080 ti and a pny card with with 2GB ram. Will it consider the overall amount of ram? Divide the charge between the two?

Thanks for reading, and hope someone knows,

have fun everyone!

 

EDIT: given where the discussion is heading to, I'd be very honnored if those who knows about render farms could chime in, and tell me about their experience, please.

Gordig

The way Iray works is that it attempts to load the scene onto each individual card; every card that can load the scene will be used to render. 2GB is basically nothing as far as Iray is concerned, especially now that Iray forces RTX emulation on pre-RTX cards, so it's unlikely that the 2GB card will ever do anything for you. 

rrward

Like Gordig said, IRay will only see that 2GB is available when you try to render. WHat can help, however, is to use the 2GB card to drive the monitor and use the 1080ti for rendering only. Then your computer is still responsive when you're rendering and you can do something else at the same time.

Ukyuu

Thank you very much @Gordig & @rrward !

I'm not yet finished with the below scene (this is simply the posing phase after all) but I'm afraid of what will hapen when I'm going to make the different renders that will serve as backgrounds of the many subscenes I'm going to make. I thought adding a pny card with 2GB would be enough, I guess I'll have to tab on a 4GB one...

Gordig

Unfortunately, I wouldn't expect a 4GB card to handle that scene, either. 

Ukyuu

Then, about how much RAM would be needed?

Maybe it's best I hire a render farm, make several renders of that scene, and then use much smaller case subscenes?

Gordig

Render that scene with your current setup, then check the log to see how much VRAM was used (and/or monitor the render with GPU-Z while it's happening). That will give you some indication of how much VRAM you should shoot for. I don't know what your budget is like, but a 12GB 3060 is around $500, which will be a significant improvement on your 1080ti.

Ukyuu

Gordig said:

I don't know what your budget is like, but a 12GB 3060 is around $500, which will be a significant improvement on your 1080ti.

 

I don't think you can even find it for under 1000€ in France, so that's way out of my price range. and I would have to update my motherboard because then my processor would be showing up its limits (I have a i5 for now, I intend to go I7).

Ever since I'm on a wheelchair, I've lost all means of incomes, so my husband provides me with money for now. I'm brushing up my 3D skills, and slowly upping my game so I can regain some means of income. As such, I'm trying to slowly upgrade my PC, but I don't want to be totally dependent on my husband either, so it's why I thought of the render farm since GPU/CPU have become wild crazy out of price.

cridgit

Redacted

PerttiA

Ukyuu said:

Gordig said:

I don't know what your budget is like, but a 12GB 3060 is around $500, which will be a significant improvement on your 1080ti.

I don't think you can even find it for under 1000€ in France, so that's way out of my price range. and I would have to update my motherboard because then my processor would be showing up its limits (I have a i5 for now, I intend to go I7).

In Finland the price of 3060 12GB is starting at 389eur (24% VAT included) and there are several models below 500eur

The i5 would be fine

Ukyuu

cridgit said:

If you really want to know about setting up a home render farm, or you can do using something like AWS, see this old but still relevant thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/132951/tutorial-iray-server-render-farm-batch-rendering-for-daz-studio/p1

However from what I understood you're trying to do above if you want to use the city as background to scenes you're going to make later I suggest you either use a set of existing city HDRIs (there are several here in the store or free elsewhere), or you can split your city up into segments and render your own hi-res HDRIs to use as backdrops + lighting. You should be able to render smaller segments of the city this way and it'll give you much smaller/faster renders later if you're going in for say 2 bank robbers jumping out of a parked car (most of the city won't be visible in the background).

 

I guess I will have to review the sky fights scenes I want to do, & do something more "doable," I wanted the characters in the game to freely walk the portion of the city I've put on the scene, but I guess I won't be able to.

And I was speaking of borrowing cloud GPU computing or online render farms, not setting a home render one, but the link you provided was very informative through.

Drip

Ukyuu said:

cridgit said:

If you really want to know about setting up a home render farm, or you can do using something like AWS, see this old but still relevant thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/132951/tutorial-iray-server-render-farm-batch-rendering-for-daz-studio/p1

However from what I understood you're trying to do above if you want to use the city as background to scenes you're going to make later I suggest you either use a set of existing city HDRIs (there are several here in the store or free elsewhere), or you can split your city up into segments and render your own hi-res HDRIs to use as backdrops + lighting. You should be able to render smaller segments of the city this way and it'll give you much smaller/faster renders later if you're going in for say 2 bank robbers jumping out of a parked car (most of the city won't be visible in the background).

 

I guess I will have to review the sky fights scenes I want to do, & do something more "doable," I wanted the characters in the game to freely walk the portion of the city I've put on the scene, but I guess I won't be able to.

And I was speaking of borrowing cloud GPU computing or online render farms, not setting a home render one, but the link you provided was very informative through.

Well, you're already on your way setting up your cities' general map, which will be useful. But especially when rendering scenes from ground level, it'll be a very good idea to just disable/hide the cityblocks that are hidden behind other cityblocks anyway. Cityblocks generally don't take too much memory, but it does add up when you have a lot of them. If their textures aren't too big, you might still be able to render most of it in one go to create a map or overview, but then you'd really have to leave out all vehicles and characters, and probably also the trees. Usually I let my computer do such renders at night while I'm asleep, so it won't interfere with other tasks I need to do on my computer.

If there are cityblocks that you use multiple times, then it may be a good idea to place only 1 in your scene, and make an instance from that one to place at other locations. Using instances reduces memory requirements by a lot. And that applies to every kind of object: cars, trees, grass, even characters (do mind that those characters will be identical in every way, including colors, textures and poses. I think you can only adjust things like position, rotation and size.

UHF

You could try Octane.  Its only limit is that geometry has to fit in the video card.  Its also faster than Iray.  The downside is that you'll have to adjust shaders for any materials that are important in the scene.

mding

Maybe this could help you out:

http://www.jacktomalin.com/iray

It is specifically provided for DAZ Studio IRAY users. But I haven't tried it (yet).

BTW amazing scene!

Ukyuu

@Drip: thank you for those reminders, I had completely forgotten about them!

@UHF sorry, I'd rather avoid multiplying the softwares at that moment. My illness makes it hard to properly learn/use one at a time, so adding more is stretching it already.

@mding Thanks! that's exactly what I was looking for when I said a render farm! Thanks for the compliment, that's the inner (now full-walled) sector of Ibla, the capital of my story & future game.