The in-and-outs of Post-Denoiser

Voxxa

I've been using Post-Denoiser for a while. Sometimes the results are great, other times it looks "cartoony" and has a "smeared" appearence to it. Something like you see in jpeg-images that's been saved a couple of times too much. Still you can get amazing results plus the fact that it also seems to speed up the render time. I've followed some posts about it here at the forum. One explanation is that if your graphic card is too weak or can't handle the size of the image or there's too much going on in the image, it connects to the CPU. When it does, the explanation read, DAZ Studio disconnects the Post-Denoiser. 

My problem is that it connects and disconnects even though I have a Nividia RTX 3060 12 GB. I have to save whatever I'm doing, shut down DAZ Studio. Then start up again - and voilá! It works, albeit for a shorter amount of time, then it's in and out again. Does that sound familiar to anyone out there?!? Solutions?! My Intel i7 8700 CPU 3.20 MHz can handle graphics, so...

markusmatern

I don't kow about your specific problem, because I use the standalone post denoise options discussed here:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/385411/how-do-i-save-the-post-denoiser-version-of-a-render-and-no-denoiser-version-at-the-same-time

To quote myself:

I usually use an external batch process to denoise after rendering using the Intel based denoiser.

There are several options mentioned in these threads:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/334881/use-this-a-i-based-open-source-de-noiser-from-the-comfort-of-daz-studio

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/316206/denoise-renders-and-save-a-lot-of-time-nvidia-not-reqd/

I open the original and denoiser version as layers in post processing and combine them.

Voxxa

Thank you very much for the links although I was more after why post denoise kicks in and drops out - almost always. Perhaps another glitch in the programming?

prixat

The Denoiser does take a bit of memory, perhaps your scene is big enough that adding the denoiser is enough to push it over the limit.

...and yes, once the GPU is disabled it's for the rest of the session until a restart.

Have you tried starting the denoiser at a later iteration?

Paintbox

I have had this problem a lot and no amount of tweaking has solved it. Because memory usage is opaque and in the abscence of a "hardware is ready to render again" signal, it's impossible to manage it. (You can sort of guess when the Nvidia container process ends) So the problem seems to be the ending of the process / freeing up memory, especially when you cancel the render, which one does a lot when one is iterating through a design.

That is one of the reasons I am moving to Blender, giving me more options to tweak the internals and settings. Diffeomorphic (haven't tried the official bridge yet) is good enough now to bring over most characters quite accurately.

Voxxa

prixat said:

Have you tried starting the denoiser at a later iteration?

Oh yes I have. Also I'm clearing the memory after the different sessions. Still, I believe this problem is on the developers side to deal with. I'm trying almost everything to deal with this. Sometimes it works with denoiser, especially on portraits and so. But if you add some stuff, and it doesn't have to me much, you notice this again.